Abortion- "It is her body!" But is it?

Yes, we have different view.
1st. There is no absolute truth. Truth is subjective. I am not trying to convince anyone what is right or wrong. It is subjective. We have legal or illegal. Those are the facts. They may be right, they may be wrong. But it is how society functions.

I came here to put in my 2 cents.
Seemed like there was a lot of abortion talk going on.
If you're trying to resolve when life begins, good luck. You'll have 100 people and 100 different opinions. That is all philosophy is, one's opinion.

 

But your legs don't eventually leave your body and eventually walk on their own.

 

Of course I understand the dictionary. The dictionary and the law reflect current social attitudes, they are not perfect, they are not unchangeable, they are often wrong.

You are doing the same as the rest of the abortionists - saying "Its the law!" "Its not a baby!" If that's all you have to do to resolve the issue then the issue would have been resolved in 1973. Obviously the issue is not resolved, and you are doing nothing to move it forward.

 

That's your best argument yet...and the most mature Anti-Choice remark in this thread....Gee, you must 've won the debate since you know the funniest cartoons...but it is an appropriate thing for you to hide behind ...

 

You're still drooling crap because you have no answer deeper than a 4 letter word starting with "f"...a sure sign of a blankslate

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You haven't proved that a fetus is a person, that women must be forced to give birth because you want them to, and you have NEVER answered why you think someone should be able to force YOU to sustain their life... YOu haven't done much but post your favorite cartoon...

 

My conscience needs no help ...I believe strongly that women have the same rights as everyone else....I don't need to rationalize that....you may need to hide behind your desire to control and punish women by talking about how you think a fetus is a person and claim humans NEVER take other humans lives in war or executions...only women do that...


But my conscience is clear as anyone's should be who defends the rights of "born citizens"...

 

And if you want to sit and stare at your navel while contemplating that fine... but a fetus is alive and NOT a person no matter how many times you need to think it is...my arm is alive , it is not a person...

 

Um this is Political Forum, only English is allowed.

 

And you have not proven it is not a person. I have made a rational argument many times, even earlier in this thread. You have made no argument at all.

Of course I have, you just don't read those posts just like you don't read all the posts in this thread.

If the preborn is a person, then the rights of the preborn and the rights of the mother must be balanced (that should sound amazingly familiar - I've posted it perhaps 100 times). Pregnancy is a unique situation, and is almost always voluntary (pregnancy due to rape is involuntary, but even in that case why should an innocent person - the baby - be given the death penalty for a crime it did not commit?). If the removal of the unborn person will kill it, then the reason for its removal must warrant a death sentence. A baby is helpless, it has no malice, the only reason to kill it is if the life of the mother is significantly at risk to the point that the choice is either the baby dies or both the mother and baby die.

Does that mean you will post SpongeBob clips instead of your "Its the law!" rant? SpongeBob will be much more interesting.

 

Yes....but if you notice, those in here with NO POINT ( or facts) want to discuss abortion philosophically...

 

Here you go around in your little circles of denial and lies just like in the Abortion Forum that you had to leave for some reason ....

 

That is a fact of humanity. It is seen at the level of the individual and society. People sometimes wonder how followers of Stalin, Mao, Hitler, could kill so many men, women and children. Through propaganda the unwanted segments of society were dehumanized, eventually they were considered less than human, ignorant, the enemy, a stumbling block to progress, thieves. When the day came to relocate, imprison, and eradicate the undesired people, the eradicators did not feel like they were killing their fellow man but were doing their duty in removing the detritus of society.

We see the same thing in the USA with the "progressives" claims that their opposition is astroturf, ignorant troglodytes clinging to guns and religion and other outmoded relics of the past, thieves who don't pay their fair share, people whose greed keeps poor children from having food and an education.

And of course we see it from abortionists even in this thread.

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Read the thread. And I'm disappointed you did not put up a SpongeBob clip, I was hoping for some substance in your post.

 

Well, it seems that it is the only metric in order to define whether a life may considered to be terminated or not. A non-sentient being is not aware of its existence and is incapable of undergoing pain.

I guess that our ability to feel empathy and to refuse to see others sentient beings suffer is what makes us human, I guess that's why I'm pro-choice.

But that's just one fellow's opinion.

 

If the ability to feel pain is your actual metric, then many simple organisms without a brain (such as an amoeba) feel pain and threats to its health and move to avoid the source of the pain/threat. The ability to react to pain indicates it is aware of its existence - yet it does not have a brain of any kind. An unborn baby feels pain after 20 weeks, certainly after 30 weeks, it moves to avoid the cause of the pain, and it responds favorably to pleasant sensations such as the sound of its mothers voice.

There is also the issue that the fertilized egg will grow and become sentient, just as a helpless illiterate newborn will grow and become a fully functioning independent adult. The fertilized egg is just a stage in a human persons life cycle.

That's actually a key element in the abortion debate. For most of the debate, the unborn baby was invisible while the mother was visible to everyone. It was easy to focus on the pregnant woman (and not even use the term "mother"), to identify with her situation, and to have empathy for her. That one sided view (literally) has driven the issue until recently.

Now with advances in medical technology, the unborn baby is no longer faceless but can be seen through medical imaging (video and still photography). At an early stage, it looks like a baby human, it moves, it sucks its thumb like a baby. And with the ability to successfully deliver premature babies as early as 21 weeks, its clear that at 21 weeks its not a "blob of tissue" but a human baby.

Now its not so easy to simply focus on the woman and ignore the baby. People now associate the unborn baby with their own children, they empathize with the unborn baby in a deeply emotional manner. And people who were certain 30 years ago that it was not a baby at 21 weeks, it had no chance of survival outside the woman, are now shown to be wrong causing some people to wonder - if they were wrong 30 years ago, maybe they are wrong today in thinking that earlier than 21 weeks its a "mass of tissue" .

 

No, pregnancy is a unique situation and a woman’s body is always hers. There is no legitimate reason to object to recognising pregnancy as something different to any other medical circumstances. That doesn’t mean we couldn’t reach a valid conclusion to treat it just like other medical circumstances but you can’t simply close off the option of treating it differently (if on slightly or in part).

It’s currently a legal procedure in some places and in specified circumstances. Declaring the legality (or not) of the procedure is the outcome of the debate so it can’t be used as reasoning in this way. If that were the case it could never be legalised in places or circumstances it’s currently illegal.

 

An argument can be made from the direction of her body and right to privacy, but I think a more compelling argument is simply that the fetus is not a person because the fetus has no mind. A clump of cells with no mind is not a person at all. We don't know the exact moment of "awakening," but we do know that consciousness is physically impossible when most abortions occur. Therefore, there is no tragedy in early abortions. It is no different from any other medical procedure, like removing a bothersome gallbladder or appendix.

 

This is false. Amoebas react to noxious stimuli because amoebas that do so survive. It is no more consciousness than the spinal reflex that makes my knee jerk in response to my tendon being struck. It is a mechanical (or chemical) reflex.

You'll have to give me a source to the sound of the voice thing, but I have seen 20 weeks as an absolute minimum for consciousness. And yet, almost all abortions occur prior to this. So why is it relevant? And again, withdrawing from noxious stimuli can be a reflex without conscious thought. Your body doesn't wait for your mind to pull your hand away from the hot stove.

As are sperm and eggs. Given the right conditions, we could make any cell into a new person. That doesn't mean that every cell, every sperm, every egg, has value comparable to a person with a mind.

You could argue they are vulnerable persons, if they were persons.

Well someday we could probably grow a person without a woman, but that doesn't mean it wouldn't start out as a blob of mindless tissue. Looking like a baby doesn't make it a person. Personhood lies in the mind. Doesn't have to be a sophisticated mind, but a mind.

Just more misleading of people, just like the older images of bloody abortions grossing people out. I'm sure people would have an emotional reaction to what happens during autopsies, cutting up a former person's organs. Sure, it looks like a person, and it once housed a person, but it's a corpse and cutting it up doesn't hurt the person because there is no person there anymore. Similar principle for a fetus that looks like a baby/person, but isn't yet.

 

That wasn't a part of the argument I was addressing.

 

Cancer isn't human? It's human tissue no less than a foetus would be. Cancer doesn't have the ability to become a separate person, but that wasn't a part of the argument I was addressing.

 

Resolving the question is not the goal. The more opinions the merrier.

what

Because my opinion has never been that a woman shoukd be forced to give birth!

How is your arm alive?

Um...What?

 

'Shape-shift'...really? That's one of the most idiotic ideas I've heard. A fetus is a fetus until a certain point of time in the pregnancy. Regardless of whether a woman chooses to abort or give birth.

 

True .. still does not equate to such a thing as an "after birth" abortion .. abortion is "The deliberate termination of a pregnancy", unless you are suggesting that their is such a thing as an "after birth" pregnancy then an "after birth" abortion is 100% incorrect and simply does not exist anywhere outside of the illusions of pro-lifers.

 

Correct, if the fetus is a person then it does have the rights and protection granted to all people .. along with all the restrictions as well .. guess what one of those restrictions is that as a person it CANNOT impose or violate another persons autonomy without consent, and that consent is not reliant on any previous action conducted by the (in this case) female. The fetus under the pro-life ideology is a separate, independent person and anyone who knows even the slightest bit about law knows that consent to one person (the man) for one action (sexual intercourse) CANNOT be used as proxy consent for another person (The Fetus) for a separate action (Pregnancy) .. pro-lifers seems to be under the misconception (pun not intended) that consenting to one person means consenting to another person which is just plain stupid.

One could suggest that consenting to sexual intercourse means implied and/or informed consent to pregnancy .. however, implied and/or informed consent can be revoked at anytime, for any reason (or even no reason at all) .. just because a person implied acceptance does not mean they lose the right to say 'no' at a later date.

Add to this that unless the female consent to the injuries that pregnancy causes her - and remember that those injuries are caused and maintained by a third party (the fetus) - then she has every right to use the appropriate force to stop them from happening .. in the case of pregnancy her only recourse to stop those injuries is to use deadly force, she cannot withdraw, she cannot ask the fetus to withdraw and she cannot use non-lethal methods ergo her use of abortion as a method to stop the non-consented injuries from continuing is fully justified, and finally under the equal protection clause the state has a duty of care to help and aid her in accomplishing her goal of stopping those non-consented injuries.

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Humans do.

 

It is huh? That's interesting, how does it survive as a separate body inside the body of another? That would be suffocating I would think, being submerged in a uterus. And food, there can't be much food just floating about in a uterus.

In truth, the fetus is not separate until it has been separated. Just like you would not consider your arm separate from your body, until the point that it has been removed from your body.

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But if they did they would be your legs up until that point.

 

'Person' is a legal term, not a philosophy issue. Philosophy arguments relating to abortion are deontological or rights-based and generally rest on the claims -

(1) that the existence and moral right to life of human beings (human organisms) begins at or near conception-fertilization
(2) that induced abortion is the deliberate and unjust killing of the embryo in violation of its right to life
(3) that the law should prohibit unjust violations of the right to life.

of course all of the above would require evidence to support them .. problem is there isn't any concrete evidence to support them. Rights are founded on ethical value judgements, which may be empirical or rational. A right is that which confers legitimacy upon an action or a belief.

There are three main principles that govern a system of rights. Firstly, a later right cannot contradict an earlier one (assuming both are granted by the same authority) unless that earlier right has been explicitly repudiated.
Secondly, a right can only be conferred on a body by another body of greater authority or by that body itself.
Thirdly, authority can be ceded.

Because people choose to, just as you choose to drink or not drink, smoke or not smoke . .that is one of the fundamental foundations of autonomy.

I see like most pro-lifers you are adapt at putting words into other people mouths, please can you show where Fox says "the fetus is nothing", or are you suggesting that anything that is not a person "is nothing"?

life is not the issue here, life gets destroyed everyday, life only has as much value as another places upon it .. true even for you.

hmm .. do we allow people who injure others without consent to have their say in their punishment, or is their a body that enforces that punishment?
You seem to forget that it is the fetus that is the instigator and maintainer of injuries to the female and not the other way round.

Babies, toddlers etc are socially dependent, a fetus is biologically dependent .. ie socially dependent people can be looked after by anyone, biologically dependent fetuses can only be looked after by one person .. the pregnant woman.

There is nothing morally wrong with abortion, it is not more immoral than you defending yourself against another person who is injuring you without your consent.