If a girl is raped and pregnant, should she keep the baby?

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@Oodain

Presenting what we know about the consciousness does not make it into a consistent standard. It might be one day, but I doubt it. Capable of being consciousness is not a good standard anyway, since we know that children develop and there is no point at which a definitive line can be drawn, all your left with is a standard about as rough as amputation by chainsaw.

Then perhaps you need to reconsider which view is more important to you. If you see a clash between hard-naturalism and the intrinsic value of human beings, then you need to pick which one you think is more important shape your beliefs accordingly.

I don't know if someone else brought this up and I'm not going to read this whole thread just because WP has crap for search features.

For normal healthy women with no history of fertility issues, 10% of all successfully fertilized eggs are miscarried.

75% of those in the first 2 weeks before the woman has any way of knowing that she is pregnant.

A total of 85% will be miscarried within 6 weeks of fertilization.

This means that 8.5% of all pregnancies are ended by God potentially without the mother ever knowing that she was pregnant. We know there are some women who do not know they are pregnant until they go into labor, so 6 weeks to many women could just be "my cycle is off".

"I missed my period but then it came late"

etc.

If nothing else, this pokes some holes in the "life begins at conception" argument. The man upstairs ends far more pregnancies than we do.

I thought you said before you didn't believe in God, now you drag him into this to support your argument, you must be getting desperate.

If a miscarriage occurs naturally, it occurs naturally. You can't compare that to the deliberate choice on the part of an individual to end a child's life.

I say she should kill the little motherf*cker and dispose of its corpse by feeding it to carnivorous marine life.

So you're saying in a perfect world rape could still happen but the child wouldn't exist. Seriously, you are advocating my cousin's child should not exist, I think if you were standing in front of her she'd slap you, and quite frankly you would deserve it.



Thank you for proving my case about pro-abortion individuals attempting to dehumanize children so people would consider it okay to kill them.

@Inuyasha

I know we don't agree on everything, but, well said.

Any women who has been raped and is knocked up with the rapists lil' bastard should give Brotha Lynch Hung a call.....I'm sure he can take care of the infant problem cuz his kidz gotta eat.

sigh.... I am saying that in a perfect world, in which rape does not exist, your cousin's child would not exist. Because thanks to the rapist and his rape activity the particular child comes to life.


pro-choice != pro-abortion, there is a difference. Now..... I personally am pro-abortion, but that is not to say all pro-choicers are pro-abortionists.

what we know of consociusness means we can, under certain conditions, say if it is there or not, we know some of the minimal requirements so to speak(not that it is that black and white at all)
actually the point of 12 weeks set a limit some 4 weeks before the earliest observed point of interconection, we can with quite good certainty say that a 12 week old embryo cannot have qualia.

as for the rest, i think i madfe my point quite clear.

i dont care what a beings constituent components are, nor their arrangement, not in itself anyway.
i care about it's capacity to "feel", act acording to will and intelligence, these might not be hard set but at least they are not entirely arbitrary like the classification of humans as "special".

Hypothetically, what if you had a son and he grew up and raped you? Would you disown him and abandon him or would you get him mental help? Probably the previous right? Or is that different?

Still not dehumanizing.
Oh BTW found a picture you might like:

You seem to be missing the point I am attempting to make; perhaps I am being unclear. We do know for certain that the lack of consociusness does not denote the lack of life.



I have been making a rather stringent effort to keep the hard problem of the mind out of this discussion. Your mention of qualia is actually quite puzzling to me. You seem to be a stringent naturalist; so I did not expect you to mention this here. Put simply, we have next to zero idea of what part of the mind might be the grounding of the emergent component of the human mind. Stuart Hameroff has some theories, but they remain mostly that. By mentioning qualia, you fall victim to the thought experiment of David Chalmers. Chalmers holds that we could have fully functioning human beings (the p-zombies... actual term btw) with no 'qualia' and we would have no way of telling the difference between them and others with 'qualia'. If there is such a thing as 'qualia'. Then a human brain with or without qualia would be the same and there would be a difference. Logic however tells us that if a and b are not alike; then a and b are not the same thing. Ergo qualia and the brain are not the same thing. Hence why qualia, in the emergent sense, is associated mostly with classical dualism or property dualism.

Basically if you accept qualia, then you cannot say with certainty that a 12 week limit has any purpose what-so-ever; hence why I did not expect anyone who is pro-choice to mention it.



A child in the womb can never be those things. Surely we are past the point where people are arguing that there should be no restrictions on abortion. Even the most ardent pro-choicer, now days, would seem to admit that after a point the child actually has rights that override the rights of the mother. For example, I don't see many people who think late term abortions should be unrestricted. I think the debate about abortion has, for the most part, moved past the criteria you are presenting.

Further, viewing humans as intrinsically valuable seems to be a very good tautology for basing secular moral epistemology on. Even if it cannot be objectively justified without reference to God (which I agree with you on), it seems quite a good practical starting position.

i view it this way,
a baby cannot survive without it's mother untill a certain point (well after the 12 and 18 week marks)
a mother is an actual alive human being with feelings, for the first trimester we can with good certainty say the baby cannot experience, so i think any need of the mother outwheighs that of the child in this period, however once we get past the 12 week mark(to be honest it could be 14 or 16 but better safe than sorry, at twelve weeks the embryo is in a completely different growth stage as opposed to 18-20) the baby does have a chance, in reality it is probably much later but there is a chance, so thats where i draw the line.

which is why i think the argument that being pro choice is inhumane or cruel to be complete and utter BS, just as saying the opposite would be.

but when one legislates that abortion is inherently wrong one risks pressuring people into decisions that will cause permanent damage to everyone involved, including the child.
should we sacriice anything for a human life? even the well being of others?
to me that is what it comes down to.

as for your first argument, bacteria is life, you need another way to give rights but life itself, that stuff is literally everywhere(on earth)

I don't think this is viable logic either. Newborns are still dependent on their mothers also. Based on this logic a child of any age (any most post-graduate students) would be burdens. What is interesting is that you seem to be grappling with the fact that both entities have rights in this discourse. Where our opinions differ, if that I think the mother's right to choose is most often overridden by the child's right to live.



I agree with this statement. As a general rule I do think well being is less important than life. Well being can be developed, a life once lost, cannot be repaired by anything other than the divine.



That is why I think human life is intrinsically valuable. I already pointed out, in my last post, that it is unlikely that you will find a way to objectively ground this without recourse to the divine. I did however make the point that it seems a good starting place for practical purposes.

i dont even consider divine to be a valuable argument.

newborns can physically live without their mother, an embryo before week 20 has little chance of that.
a child already born can be adopted and the mothers involvement would end relatively fast if that is what she want, with something growing inside of her she cannot.
i have no issue grappling a child having rights i simply dont give them on the same basis as you,

to say that human life is valuable because human life is valuable is in my mind circular logic and in teh face of quite a few scenarios it would not hold up at all, it would be the same as saying, we give up figuring this issue out, its too hard.

many live with relatively milder experiences and it still haunts them, to say that any and all or that even most serious mental damage can be reversed is a bit odd.

It was only a few posts ago you were arguing that consciousness was the objective standard. I think we are well past this logic. Most people, I hope yourself included, would think aborting a 19week old child was wrong. So your standard here does not work either.



This is certainly true.



I have said in both of my last two posts that you would find it difficult accepting the intrinsic value of human life on your own worldview. Saying you don't accept it, and that you reject mine, is essentially stating the obvious. I would hope that you would recognize it, at the very least, as a useful and practical tautological proposition. The problem is that, given your worldview, most of the ethical propositions you adhere to would eventually encounter the same problem. Selecting this particular proposition and saying it does not work, really only says something of your own worldview, not the issue in question.