Are Autistics whom are Pro-Abortion hypocrits?

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I haven't read through the entire 6 pages, but it appears that I'm not missing much. Inuyasha is still blabbing his multiply-falsified claim that "brain waves" are detected at 40 days, and the same old list of half-truths and emotional equations of zefs with children, with jews in death camps, and with any other oppressed group he can think of, now including Aspies.

For the record: brain waves are not detectable in a zef until the 3rd trimester. There is incoherent electrical activity before that, but nothing that is recognizable as coming from a mammalian brain (much less a human child).

For the record: Autism and Down's Syndrome are not the same thing. I'm frankly a little insulted that the comparison is even being made.

For the record: Down's syndrome people have virtually no reproductive capability, so the claim of 'genocide' against them is pointless. There will always be polyploidy de novo, regardless of how many Down's zefs are aborted.

Personally, I absolutely would abort if I found my zef had Down's Syndrome. I would abort if I found my zef had low-functioning autism. I would abort if I found my zef had cerebral palsy, or any of dozens of other abnormalities. That's my choice and my right. Other women would choose differently, and that's their choice and their right.

Inuyasha's problem is that he doesn't care what anyone says.

He only cares about what he says.

In other words, his stance can be summed up as follows:

Last edited by cave_canem on 05 Mar 2011, 10:30 pm, edited 1 time in total.

Defective zefs topic

Interesting term for a fetus. Zef-fetus. Nice ring.

Just to let you know, CP is not diagnosed until after the birth. My son's was not dx until 18 months, and his is the mildest form there is. No need to worry, though--CP is still rare.

I have found dozens of pics of aborted fetuses that have alarming birth defects, some quite shocking. It is fortunate that there are ways of detecting defects, most of which would not be viable anyway if they went to term.

zygote/embryo/fetus.
Aka conceptus, aka product of conception.

Thanks for the heads up topic

Interesting anagram I will pass it on.

Day 40: Brain waves can be detected and recorded.
http://www.pregnancy.org/article/overvi ... evelopment

So basically we have brain waves at day 40, I believe you owe me an apology.



Quite frankly I could care less, what makes a baby with Autism more valuable than a baby with Down Syndrome? We are all human beings!



Source plz?



I'm not sure they have any way to tell if the child has high or low functioning Autism, I also believe the high functioning variety is the one that tends to run in families if I remember correctly, I'd have to dig out my research notes.



Those may not be birth defects.

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=us_y9GP_-DA[/youtube]

It seems some of the "defects" are the result of what could only be described as torturing someone to death.

Y'know, I think what is going on is that what the website is calling "brain waves", LKL is calling "incoherent electrical activity" and "nothing that is recognizable as coming from a mammalian brain". This distinction drawn by LKL is valid enough. Very minor neural activity is not really a sign of any high degree of cognitive function.


Some humans are more valuable than others. Frankly, if my life were held in comparison to an athlete, genius, self-made rich scholar, I would have to say that my life would in general have to be considered worth less than his. If one person had to die, then I would probably be picked to die, and the basic reason would be clear.


This is pretty basic.
1) Downs Syndrome has below average life outcomes both due to handicaps and due to health issues (health issues including early death.)
2) Mental handicaps are generally unattractive to people.
3) Downs syndrome isn't passed down as a gene, but rather is a genetic defect that spontaneously emerges with emergence partially predicted by age of the mother at conception.


I don't know what you are talking about, and 2nd semester abortions are rare.

I suppose it was only a matte of time before this thread became about Abortion itself.

Wrong. There have been no studies that really have experimented on the brain activity under discussion in humans. Due to ethical concerns such research has been limited to animals (at least the unborn have a right not to be experimented on). Such studies have shown that fetal movement and brain activity in early gestation are linked. It takes more than very minor neural activity for this to occur.



What utter sophistry. Your logic taken to a conclusion could lead to all sorts of terrible outcomes.



Suction abortions are pretty awful events also. The rarity of a practice has no implication upon its moral nature.

I don't think you've actually addressed the substance of the concern. The substance is that neurological development at that period of time is not believed to have reached a point where the advanced structures required for a being to have a lot of the psychological properties of a person are going to exist.

As it stands, we have to recognize that at the age of 40 days, this thing is not even an inch in length. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prenatal_d ... ent#Week_8 The idea that it has cognitive capabilities even approaching that of an adult human or even a child is preposterous. The entire entity is a fraction of the size of just my brain alone. Unless all that is in an adult brain is just dead-weight, I feel pretty confident that the fetus can't match it.


No, not sophistry at all. Even further, at the point where it leads to all sorts of terrible conclusions, it is probably no longer my logic and thus no longer my responsibility. Finally, is any element of this obviously false in any form or fashion? It is clear that some people increase the well-being of others more than other people do. It is clear that some people advance the development of society more than other people do. It is clear that some people have greater potential to increase well-being or advance the development of society, and thus can be expected to provide these greater benefits. If those traits are valuable, and an entity that has more valuable traits than another entity is more valuable than that other entity, then some people are clearly more valuable than others. Are you going to deny that these traits are valuable? Are you going to deny that an entity with more valuable traits than another entity is a more valuable entity? If those two very basic assumptions are accepted(and they almost have to be) then how is the application to people invalid?


The rarity of a practice has a lot of implications upon a discussion where that practice is just a subset of the total activity. If a soldier rapes a civilian, this is not cause to say "The military is a corrupt bunch of scumbags". If a 2nd semester abortion occurs and is ugly, this is not cause to say "all abortions, regardless of development, are evil".

In any case, if I don't think it is meaningfully a person at this point in time, I won't really care how they handle the situation.

If by "pro-abortion" you mean "pro-choice" (nice to see your emotional rhetoric on yet ANOTHER abortion thread)
neither Autistics nor Neurotypicals have exclusive dibs on favoring reproductive freedom.

A newborn does not have many of the advanced structures. Are you in favor of being allowed to kill newborns? What we do have is enough brain activity that the brain is in control over the body's motor functions... more brain control than is evident within a coma patient. If one is not allowed to kill the coma patient with a lower level of brain control then one what basis can one kill the unborn?



We are talking about the objective line at which someone is alive... the standard is either works or it fails.



People are ends, not means. Their value is inherent in their nature.



True... but its an inapplicable analogy. The number of rapes carried out on civilians by soldiers has no bearing on the wrongness of the action. Even if every solider did it (this is NOT to say this is the case AT ALL) it would not remove the responsibility upon the individual or the justice system that oversees them.

I think I've stated this before, but I am more sympathetic to the idea that newborns are not actually persons than the idea that fetuses are.

In any case, coma victims actually have more developed brain structures, and we don't kill them on the assumption that those existing brain structures will recover. If those brain structures do not recover, then yes, we do kill beings in that position, suggesting that the reason why we don't kill them is a matter of continuity with a past existing person, not because of respect for the level of brain functioning they currently display. Fetuses just don't have these brain structures at all. They are not continuous with a past person.


Umm.... no? Actually that discussion was about differing values of beings. So, you didn't quote me on that particular issue.


People are both. The very structure of society requires that we treat people as a means to an end, even if we still regard them as ends in and of themselves. Some deaths will always be needed to achieve goals. Some losses of life have to be accepted on the crass logic of economics. The person who created your shoes is just an abstraction to you, and the entire set of people who create all of your usable items is likely beyond your comprehension. Even further, I see no reason why one cannot apply the prior logic to human beings.


Well, ok, but the issue is still that one cannot condemn all abortions on the grounds of 2nd trimester methods.

If only every pro-abortion person could here you say that. You are just.... so totally.... wrong.



A fetus will develop totally within 9 months. If a coma patient had that chance then they would never be killed. Your logic reinforces the pro-life position.



Just listen to yourself.



True, Suction abortions are terrible enough. I would however like to see you condemn partial birth abortions; that would be a good move towards an understanding.

Some of them do. Peter Singer is a clear example, and with a framework bearing some similarities to my framework. I am more conservative in my conclusions than he is.


Right, but the core of my logic disagrees, and I already stated that core:
"In any case, coma victims actually have more developed brain structures, and we don't kill them on the assumption that those existing brain structures will recover. If those brain structures do not recover, then yes, we do kill beings in that position, suggesting that the reason why we don't kill them is a matter of continuity with a past existing person, not because of respect for the level of brain functioning they currently display. Fetuses just don't have these brain structures at all. They are not continuous with a past person. "

So, I am making a distinction based upon continuity and current existence of structures, and this is not incoherent, nor would that support the pro-life position.


I have. This is just a fact. Military engagements always involve deaths. Many economic engagements also have in the past, and will likely in the future involve deaths. Scientific accomplishments will often tend to require peoples deaths due to unforeseen possibilities, and foreseen possibilities that we had no control over. Space travel has been a risky endeavor, and we have been willing to have people die just to further our scientific goals and desires. Finally, just in costs and benefits, not every risk reduction that can be included will be included due to financial reasons, and for financial reasons that are often justifiable.


I wouldn't condemn an abortion method though if I think that the fetus wasn't a person. I wouldn't care as much about the method was if the fetus was a person, as the abortion would be more of the problem. So I don't see the point.

Peter Singer is not someone who will help your case. His own views are quite simply, disgusting, as they deny the inherent value of being a human being and in many cases of being a human person. One of the best arguments for the need for religious beliefs was made inadvertently by Peter Singer:

After all, why - in the absence of religious beliefs about being made in the image of God, or having an immortal soul - should
mere membership of the species Homo Sapiens be crucial to whether the life of a being may or may not be taken?

So basically anyone who thinks that people are objectively inherently valuable, must be religious, at least on his logic. Under this view, no one simply has 'unalienable rights' natural rights; rather justification is required. I can imagine no lasting basis, upon which our present society could persist in which people were deprived of the presumption of natural rights. All of the benefits that a society in which people are inherently equal would be utterly ended.



You are committing an ought from is fallacy; the fact that people (may) die necessarily says nothing of the moral value of their dying. Lots of children die, it does nothing to justify the killing of the unborn.

This is a 35 day old embryo:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Tubal ... embryo.jpg
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fetus
quote:
Week 9 to 16
Fetuses are not capable of feeling pain at the beginning of the fetal stage, and may not be able to feel pain until the third trimester.[12] At this point in development, uncontrolled movements and twitches occur as muscles, the brain and pathways begin to develop.[13]
The claim that zefs as young as 40 days show brain waves is based on a 1951 study by Japanese researchers who attempted to obtain EEGs on hysteriotomy-aborted zefs before they died. It was cited by Dr. H.Hamlin in 1965, in a discussion on when to declare comatose patients brain-dead, and then taken up by the pro-life movement and not updated since then.
http://eileen.250x.com/Main/Einstein/Brain_Waves.htm
quote:
Contrary to what Okamoto and Kirikae found, however, in modern EEG studies "normal sleep spindles" are not seen in premature babies before 32-35 weeks, according to the medical textbook Electroencephalography: Basic Principles, Clinical Applications, and Related Fields, and no activity in the cerebral cortex, drug-stimulated or not, has been observed by anyone else as early as 120 days. This makes it likely that Okamoto and Kirikae's readings were mostly artifacts (electroencephalographic waves that arise from a source other than the brain). In partial corroboration, though, R. Engel (1964, 1975) is said in Electroencephalography to have obtained high-voltage medium (neither fast nor slow) waves from a 19-week (133 day) premature newborn as it died from lack of oxygen. In short, the Japanese research is either largely obsolete and uncorroborated, or incorrectly quoted by Hamlin, or both.
...At 17 weeks of pregnancy (119 days after fertilization) R.M. Bergstrom also reported finding "primitive wave patterns of irregular frequency or intermittent complexes from the oral portion of the brain stem and from the hippocampus" in the midbrain, according to Electroencephalography. Even the oldest fetuses that were studied, however, had no "brain waves" or other kind of signal from the cortex up to 150 or so days.
So all that this research showed, and reported, about the brain development of 56-to-70-day embryos and fetuses is that they have live nerve cells present in their brainstems. This is not the same as "brain waves" (Willke), or "electrical waves as measured by the EEG, indicating brain functioning" ("The Pro-Life Advocate"), or "coordinating and individuating brain function" (Goldenring).
http://brainmind.com/FetalBrainDevelopment.html
quote:
At birth and for the ensuing weeks, the forebrain is so immature that its influences are limited to signaling distress in reaction to hunger or thirst; a function of the immature hypothalamus (Joseph, 1982, 1992, 1999) in conjunction with the midbrain periaqueductal gray (e.g. Larson, Yajima, & Ko, 1994; Zhang, Davis, Bandler, & Carrive, 1994). Although various limbic nuclei become functionally mature over the course of the first several postnatal months and years (Benes, 1994; Joseph, 1992, 1999), the neocortex and lobes of the brain take well over seven, ten, and even thirty years to fully develop and myelinate (Blinkov & Glezer, 1968; Conel, 1939, 1941; Flechsig, 1901; Huttenlocher, 1990; Yakovlev & Lecours, 1967).

It is rather obvious that the neonate is able to scream and cry and can even slightly lift the corners of the mouth as if smiling. However, these do not appear to be true emotions (Sroufe, 1996; however, see Izard, 1991). In fact, smiling, as well as screaming and crying can be produced from brainstem stimulation even with complete forebrain transection or destruction (Larson et al., 1994; Zhang et al., 1994; reviewed in Joseph, 1996a). Hence, neonatal and premature infant "smiling" or distress reactions to noxious stimulation (e.g. heel lance) are also likely brainstem mediated, particularly in that they may be triggered in the absence of any obvious stimulus source and following forebrain destruction or lack of development (anencephaly)
...the fetus and neonate appears incapable of thinking, reasoning, understanding, comprehending, or experiencing or generating "true" emotion or any semblance of higher order, forebrain mediated cognitive activity. Rather, although capable of learning, the increasingly complex behaviors demonstrated by the fetus and neonate, including head turning, eye movements, startle reactions, crying, screaming, and rudimentary smiling, are probably best described as brainstem reflexes.