Republicans succeed in ploy to increase unsafe abortions

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@Narcissus:

FYI "zef" is an acronym for zygote/embryo/fetus. I used to think it was a pejorative term, and it may very well be, but neither am I sure that is the intent. For my purposes, I feel that it does have the effect of depersonalizing the unborn, and I find it mildly offensive for that reason. I'll occasionally use that term myself, but I prefer not to.

You can't depersonalise a zef any more than you can depersonalise a cup of coffee. What you do, AngelRho, is personalise something which has no personhood to begin with.

I should stay away from this thread.

I have a busy day ahead of me, so I'll keep this unusually brief for me.

A claim depends on who it is the claimant is trying to convince. If I expressed a belief in pink unicorns dancing around in the clouds and you wanted to convince me otherwise, then you would have to show evidence that there are no pink unicorns dancing in the clouds. If I'm already convinced that they are, I don't need more evidence to be more convinced. I need evidence to show that I am mistaken in my beliefs.

If I not only believed in pink unicorns but knew for a fact that they existed and danced on the clouds and felt the need to convince you of same, then I would have the burden of proof to convince you of that fact if indeed it were true. I'm not the one who came up with the idea of animals possessing souls. It seemed to me a claim was being made that souls do not exist. I was challenging that claim and no evidence was presented to support that claim.

It amuses me that burden-of-proof arguments are assumed to favor one particular side as though that side has a monopoly on demanding evidence.

A human being is a human being, and it starts being an individual at conception. For the sake of clarity, I prefer to define that as occurring at implantation where it can sustain itself through the placenta for the remainder of its pre-birth development. I'm even willing to allow that the prevention of implantation absolves the parents of any responsibility to it, though I'd say one should even be cautious at that level. Technically life is already present pre-conception in that gametes are also living cells AND they are also human cells. It's at fertilization that they lose their identity as being separate impersonal life forms and take on a new individual identity. If it is a sustainable entity, it deserves protection. It is a person. All I can say past that point is only repeating myself.

If my participation in this thread can stand for only one proposition, I want it to be this: It is possible to have a respectful discussion about abortion with people with whom one fundamentally disagrees.

AngelRho and I will likely never agree on abortion. But we have each been quite clear in respecting the other's point of view. We are still caught in a circumstance where our positions are to some degree mutually exclusive, especially where it comes to public policy. But the dialogue has remained largely respectful.

And while I agree that there is no point in arguing about this, I firmly believe that there most assuredly is a point in discussing this. In an argument, we become positional--we see withing every concession the potential to lose the argument. But when we have a discussion we discover commonality; we narrow our areas of disagreement; we look for consensus; and most importantly we look for alternatives that can better meet both of our interests.

I'm not so much of a hippy to believe that a few choruses of Kumbaya will reveal the solution. But I do believe that if we start being smart instead of positional, then we can reach a circumstance that we can all live with.

I don't want to reach any common ground with AngelRho on this issue, no offence to him.

I'd like to add that I don't like arguing for the sake of it, but I see no benefit in compromising for the sake of it, especially to accommodate a position that I think is fundamentally wrong. I should probably stay out of politics for this reason.

Maybe it is. But that may be the problem also. The majority of Americans believe that abortion is morally wrong. Also, the vast majority (over 60% of Americans believe that abortion should be legal in a few or no circumstances (http://www.gallup.com/poll/147734/ameri ... lines.aspx): A view that has been the majority for the entire length of the poll history (16 years). Many have been turned off by the pretty extreme rhetoric that come out of those who are in favor of unrestricted abortion on demand and as such, that position has really lost the argument.

Even the arguments you are putting forward, that it is not life until it is conscious. Even though this position does not recommend itself on logical grounds (since abortion is absolute, consciousness is not even definable in philosophy and would never work as a standard for abortion), it is still utterly and bitterly opposed to the judgement of Roe v. Wade which made it's decision on the viability standard. By embracing a consciousness, you may not realize it, but you have rejected the possession argument (the old it's mine because it's in my body and you cannot tell me what to do). It would also mean, that even if we agreed on it as a middle-ground, that after that point we were talking about life and the taking of it would be illegal. The pro-choice position, is an absolute logical mess of contradictory standards that few of their adherents would even really support whole-hardheartedly anyway.

So destroying human cells is murder? In all situations or only the ones you say so?

That distinction would pretty much apply to all definitions of murder. The absolute failure in logic here is the inability to distinguish an example from an example that works universally. AngelRho did not say that the destruction of a a clump of cells is murder. As some have pointed out we destroy cells all the time without it being murder. A human being, could be defined as a clump of cells, no matter what stage of development they are at and destroying those cells could be wrong. That only reveals to us that we ought not be discussing 'clumps of cells' rather we should be discussing human beings.

That's essentially what I was getting at, when you talk about "clumps of cells" it distorts the argument a bit. Every living thing is just a glorified clump of cells.

I disagree with you on the definition of 'person.' I think that a 'person' is someone capable of having a personality, which a zef cannot until late in its development.

{snip agreement on sentience}


Here seems to be the disagreement at the heart of our discussion: I am a vegetarian precisely because I think that sentience is the predominant qualifier of value. To me, presence or absence of sentience is far more important than presence or absence of humanity. I am, of course, biased towards humanity, as a human (ie, all other things being equal, I will value the human more in a question over two equally sentient beings), but before that bias kicks in is a preference for beings that can relate to, and interact with, me.

No.
The placenta provides nourishment and oxygen, and removes waste and CO2 from the blood, because the zef's liver and kidneys are not functioning until birth (the former sometimes doesn't even kick in until after birth, leading to jaundice in newborns). A zef is not self-sustaining at any point in the womb.


Sigh.
There's a such a big f*****g difference between 'being physically attached to another person's body' and 'needing community support' that I cannot believe that you would even make that kind of a claim.


You are incorrect. Pain is an aversive stimulus that is consciously perceived and learned from: for example, have you ever noticed that when you touch a hot stove, your hand moves before you even feel the pain? Tha's because the signal to move your hand comes from your spine (which receives the signal from the sensory neurons in your hand a split second earlier than your brain), not from the conscious part of your brain. You only feel the pain when the signal is received and processed by your brain. What cells possess is less complex even than a reflex arc.


For the sake of whatever arbiter of sanity you prefer, please stop just making stuff up and pretending it makes biological sense, ok? It gets tiresome, and it makes you seem like an idiot.


Just because something is animate, does not mean that it is conscious and thinking. A Roomba performs its functions perfectly well with no input from a director, but that does not mean that it thinks.



Mice are mammals, which (when full grown) have some of the most complex brains on the planet regardless of their size.



Here we disagree again. I have made it perfectly clear to my family that they are to pull the plug and donate my organs if "I" should ever have the misfortune to be diagnosed as persistently vegetative ("i" in quotes, because by my definition "I" would already be dead at that point).

I use the term zef to emphasize that a developing zef is a complex and constantly changing thing. I care far more about protecting a 3rd-trimester fetus than I do about protecting an embryo, and about a zygote not at all. I use it as a term that encompasses the whole process.

And yet a human collection of cells is still human. I'm very sorry that it takes depersonalizing it to help you sleep at night.

We have a word for that already... 'Human'.

Okay, here's an argument without dehumanizing the zef.

Lots of people who end up pregnant don't have the means to support a child, is the child now expected to suffer the consequences of his parents mistakes?

That logic applies to people who are newborn also, as well as many children. Society exists for human beings, not human beings for society.