Horror of Abortion!

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No, I am not saying that the child is not human. I am saying in the simplest terms possible: "Before the threshhold of viability, the rights of the mother prevail."

A foetus born alive must be kept alive, if possible. At the moment that the foetus is born alive, it is a legal person, and all other considerations fall away.

That isn't being encouraged to kill sperm. That's being encouraged to use contraception to stop pregnancy. The killing of sperm is incidental and if we look at most contraception methods it's actually the stopping of sperm that usually occurs. That's also not relevant because a sperm isn't a Human in its life cycle. Last time I checked Haploid cells a human is not. And since sperm cells are Haploid cells then well they aren't Humans. However I could most certainly say that A zygote is a Human.


It isn't BS. Quit getting catty because you can't confuse me of your delusions.

A universe isn't a universe because it isn't big enough, because it doesn't have stars, because there aren't any atoms... etc etc etc. A Human Zygote is a Human at the start of its life cycle. Thus it is a Human. Is that so hard to understand?

Well it's fortunate then that a single atom on its own isn't a part of a Human life cycle. A zygote however is because a Zygote is an activated human egg cell that then progresses through all the stages of human life if not stopped from doing so. An atom wont do this, which is the important thing.

What's worthy of ridicule is your simple inability to understand a theorem that has been said to you over ten times and yet then try to say it is 'BS logic' by saying that it infers something occuring that doesn't occur nor does it suggest occuring.


You have completely failed to understand the point I was making, which is something that I can think even other people in favour of abortion can support me on. My argument is not about potential. You can put away all your straw-man arguments. What this argument is about is what is and what is not a Human individual. A sperm and an egg are not human individuals. They have the potential, but they aren't. After a period of time they are spent and die without ever being anything else but carriers of DNA. So that means that it doesn't matter if they are killed. A Zygote on the other hand is, because that zygote if left to progress it will go through all the stages of Human life that occur outside the womb as inside it. Thus it is a Human, just like a child is a Human, just like an adult is a Human.


Your attempt to attribute some elitism on to me is quite offensive. You are the one who is trying to defend a special priviledge, the special priviledge of a Human to kill a Human at will because said Human is inside the other Human's body. Again as I already say a Human is a Human because it's part of the Human life cycle and is identified genetically as such. It is again that you try to say the equivalent of the Universe not being the Universe because it has no stars in it. Yet obviously the Universe once had no stars.

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How could you make such obvious errors as your examples?

The Human life cycle ends at death. Somatic cell death being the general last-chance saloon. So a corpse is just what remains after the Human life cycle has completed. The Human life cycle begins at conception, the creation of the Zygote. Why? Because if the sperm and egg didn't join then all the other parts of the life cycle wouldn't have occured. If the Zygote is left to do his or her own thing then naturally the zygote will become a blastocyst, then a foetus eventually, neonate, baby, child, adult and so forth.

Last edited by Gedrene on 18 Oct 2011, 1:09 pm, edited 1 time in total.

You shouldn't have said it though. Bad things don't justify bad things. The caveat to this though is that context justified whether a thing is good.


And I disagree with you, because it just sounds like an argument to pick on the weak because they're inconvenient. I'll explain more later.


If you say so. I do admit that visagrunt at least sounds magisterial in his assertions generally. But then you have to remember what sort of people usually post on here and even joe average would be a breath of fresh air.

Gedrene is right. Human life what we attribute rights to, not persons. It is not a matter of potential, it is a matter of what is. We are all created equal.

@Visagrunt

I can respect your position. It is internally consistant, you show an appreciation for the subject matter that I wish was shared by more pro-choice adherents.

I do think you have the fundamental order of rights confused. The right to life is the foundational right upon which all others are contingent. You can have no choice unless you live. You cannot speak, unless you live. After the right to life, all others relate to quality of life. Once people get the order confused, everything cannot be put together and you end up accepting the idea that a woman can kill her child and then the taxpayer gets told to shut up, stop hating women and pay the bill. I can imagine nothing more morally abominable than that. Must I also be subjected to ridicule for my position? It does seem so.

Thanks for that, 91.

I respect our mutual disagreement over the precedence of rights, and I recognize full well that it leads to mutually exclusive interests when it comes to the establishment of public policy.

I like to believe that mine is the more liberal view--a woman who believes in the precedence of the right to life is free to carry her pregnancy to term; whereas within a legal framework that extends precedence to the infant, a woman who believes in the precedence of her right is not free to exercise it. But that doesn't mean that my position is right, and I will not suggest otherwise.

In my country we live in a legal vacuum. There is no law respecting abortion in Canada. Do we experience an abortion crisis here? Notionally the rate is about 14 per 1000 women and about 30 per 100 live births, but those are 6 year old numbers and they have been trending downward (I expect largely as a result of better and better sex education, easier access to contraceptives and better instruction in their use). Globally, we are at about half the rate per 1000 women and slightly ahead of the number per live birth (which tends to reinforce the notion of better sex education--we are having as many abortions per pregnancy as the worldwide average, but only half as many women in Canada are having the procedure).

I firmly believe that the best answer to the abortion debate is to take further steps to minimize the need for it. By given young men and women better sex education and by providing them with easier access to contraception we will, I suggest, further reduce the number of unwanted pregnancies. Errors will still occur. Threats to maternal health will still arise. Rape will still happen. But the more that abortion can be confined to the exceptional rather than the typical, the more that the debate can be framed in mutually respectful fashion.

In the end what I want to be held as incontravertible is not necessarily that my policy must be followed. For then I am only an autocrat who will let tyranny tread in his wake. Rather what I want to be accepted is what is fact and what is not fact. And it is fact that a Human Zygote, no matter how small or insignificant it may be, is, when going through the process of human growth natural to us all, as much of a Human being as any other Human being.

And even if it were the fact that people were to continue to abort a zygote, a blastocyst and any other early stage of unborn that was not viable after this day I will consider it a victory for the truth that what they killed was not some 'blob of flesh', not some spurned 'parasite', but a Human. And I am thankful for those abortionists of the condition of viability (rather than of humanity like myself) for having supported the truth with me even if they disagree with the conclusion I come to because of the fact that a foetus is Human.

This is not a human, it is a freaking, useless cell. It may one day become a human, but at this moment it goes against human rights to pretend that the rights of this... thing are so important that we have to force actual human beings to sacrifice their bodies for it.

If that is a Zygote and morover a Human Zygote then it is a Human individual. Get past your lack of imagination.
I mean I actually shuddered when you said it was a useless cell. Do you determine Humanity by its utility? Am I actually hearing a social darwinism argument coming from you? Just forget about what ever is freaking useless you are saying?


Women aren't sacrificing their bodies for goodness sake. I already said that the zygote was a Human individual. He or she is the only thing that comes close to ever being sacrificed when it comes to abortion. Quit trying to twist words to fit your ends.

You even talk about this individual that you display before us like a KKK klansman would talk about a black person when you say 'this... thing'. It's pathetic.

Every bigot who ever existed always tried to justify their lack of a real argument by claiming that their target wasn't really Human.

1/2 of them die before the mother has even noticed should we see this as a medical issue?

That's funny, this entire thread is saturated with reasoned arguments (specifically reductio ad absurdums) demonstrating why various Fetish Fetishistic arguments fail.



We're being descriptive here, namely by showing the way in which certain people fetishize the fetus and, in your case, zygote as well.



Wow. Your analogy makes next to zero sense.



I have no idea how the f*ck I'm "trying to move the goalposts". The fetus fetishists in this thread have consistently been claiming that every zygote has the same rights as people, particularly pregnant women, because of its "humanness". People have consistently been punching holes in said argument with various references to the countless HUMAN cells that die each day which nobody f*cking cares about.

Historical names, by the way, can be misleading. "Human rights" is used in the context of "rights pertaining to human persons", not rights pertaining to the human cells that die in healthy people each day or to the human sperm that dies in the process of intercourse (regardless whatever Catholics would have one believe).

So, 91, will you insist that doctors develop fancy operations or at least spend billions in research to try to keep all the HUMAN LIFE known as sperm which die in the process of intercourse alive?

Sperm is not viable until it is combined with an egg. We aren't dealing with new life until after fertilization, because the sperm is simply pieces of the genetic information from the male.

We don't have a new unique genetic code until after fertilization, so therefore your argument is a falicious one.

Alright, if viability is a test, what about the 50% of zygotes that die for no particular reason?

What natural survival rate should we consider the marker of viability?

The "threshold of viability" is still a fuzzy concept.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fetal_viab ... thresholds

It's about time that people admit that it's impossible to "precisely" carve up fetal development in any essentialist way and the best "rule of thumb" convention for personhood should be birth, because:

• A) The organism is actually physically independent from the mother at said point.
• B) A host of stuff happens within a brief time frame post-natally.

i would say that the attempt should be made to save the child if possible, not at the expense of the mothers freedom or body,

but lets face it, most pregnancies that reach a point of viability and possible consciousness(funny how they align somewhat) are wanted, the mother would probably do a lot for her child at that point

Non-issue of abortion as contraception:

http://womensissues.about.com/od/reprod ... rgumen.htm

If people don't trust this site, I could also dig up fetus fetishist sites that corroborate point #6's statistic.