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

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You spell fetus with an o, and I'm the one being pedantic because I insist on biological accuracy? I'm perfectly willing to accept that I have mixed my latin and greek roots, and the proper plural is 'fetuses' rather than 'feti.'


I did not exist at that stage, in the same way that I will not exist after I die despite the continued presence of a body that was once me. That fetus was a necessary precondition for my existence, of course: just like myriad other conditions, including those conditions determining precisely which sperm and which egg combined to make the zef that became me. That sperm and that egg were not 'me,' neither immediately before fertilization nor immediately after, despite my current state beign significantly dependent on the genes each gamete carried. I am a necessary precondition for a lifeless body that resembles me. A necessary precondition for a thing, however, is not the same as the thing itself.


Actually, a very significant number of zygotes are flushed by the woman's normal bodily processes, and a still significant number are spontaneously aborted even after implantation. Nature itself does not assign a great deal of importance to a zygote. Within the context of this discussion we are concerned about the zefs that do not spontaneously abort, but starting the clock at fertilization is simply naive.


"Love" in scare-quotes? Are you one of those people who think that something is less wonderful if we understand the mechanism for it?

The thing that bothers me is vulgarity with the way you guys word things.
Not wanting to carry a foetus and "digging it out with a dull spoon" is kind of different. I am pro-choice but still find some of your phrases nasty.

One interesting question would be whether there is an "I" when someone is asleep, or in a coma, or under anasthetic. Certainly, there doesn't seem to be concious awareness at these times.

If there was no "I" at those times then by your argument murdering someone while they were asleep would be morally equivalent to aborting a fetus.

I don't care.

I was a wanted fetus. I was lucky to be able to be born. I was lucky to have a host that accepted me both physiologically and mentally. And that was able to go with the idea of pregnancy economically. I was also lucky that no accident happened that made me unable to become a human being.

There is a whole sequence of improbabilities that allowed that fetus to become me. It costed my parents work. It costed me work because I had to survive and all that. So I think it is unfair and dehumanizing to equal any fetus that didn't go through that work and is in fact unwanted by its mother and give it more rights than me. Or rather than women who have also managed to go from fetus to person.

And note that in the bit you quoted before saying this. I was talking specifically about fertilized egg. That is not a fetus. It is basically a bunch of cells without even a brain or limbs. It is irrelevant. It has a long way before becoming a person.

Footnote: * The argument b9 used here is an appeal to vanity. I note that it is common in the arsenal of Non-sequitur that flood the abortion discussion. Ie: "I AM GLAD I WASN'T ABORTED". It is a non-sequitour because, it doesn't matter whether abortion is made legal or not. The law won't be applied retroactively. You are already born, and that won't change...

Also, if you were aborted, then you wouldn't exist. There wouldn't be a spirit that cries because it was never able to become an astronaut. No, there would be no sorrow because you wouldn't exist.

Or maybe you believe in a soul. Guess what? In that case you soul would have been thrown to another baby's body. Easy?


Hell no. Not everything alive deserves to stay alive.

Actually. NOTHING DESERVES TO STAY ALIVE.

Being alive is a challenge. Being alive requires active work and energy. Being alive requires tons of luck. Being alive is a privilege.

Raw life is meaningless and does not deserve any right to live. We kill bacteria daily and they are ALIVE. We kill tons of skin cells automatically and they are ALIVE. Condoms are supposed to kill sperm... they are ALIVE.

Not even the most radical pro-life cultures really care about cellular life like Bacteria. The reason you would have PETA throwing bombs at antibiotic makers could possibly be because they experiment with animals and not because they indiscriminately kill bacteria. Even so, most people that live 30 years probably have eaten at least some sort of plant. Plants ARE ALIVE! They have cells. Tons of them.

An embryo is ALIVE!!11. But who cares? It is not a person. It doesn't have a brain. It doesn't have limbs. It should be legal to kill it. Just like it is legal to eat a carrot.

In the case of fetus, the discussion is a little different. Thankfully, the brain is not even wired until 20-th week and most abortion proponents are fine with making abortion legal only until the 10-th. I think this is completely fair. Specially because that fetus that may given a lot of circumstances become either Ghandi or Hitler is not the only thing at stake here. We are also talking about the body of an actual human being. The pregnant woman. And her own rights to her own body. That Vex who posts in PPR is way too rational to let people say that it is correct to disregard a person's right to decide what happens inside her own body. I think that is the most basic right. I wouldn't like to hold twice my weight for 9 months. I wouldn't like to puke for 9 months. Forcing pregnancy seems to me an attack towards human rights.

You are free to believe in that. Thankfully you don't write laws.



No, sperm and egg are ingredients to make a fertilized egg. Which may or not become an embryo one day. That may or not develop into a fetus. And maybe, if the fetus is wanted, the host viable and everything goes well the fetus will become a baby and a human person that would be illegal to kill.

A fetus and a willing, viable host are ingredients in the recipe to make a baby. Without the willing, viable host the fetus is not going to become a baby. Just like without an egg a sperm is not going to become a zygote.

Why shouldn't we be rude about the fact that someone wants us to be forced against our will to have babies??

A sleeping person, and often a comatose one, has brain function and recognizably human EEG tracings. A zef has none of that until well into the 3rd trimester; neither does a corpse.
Personally, I have let my family know that if I ever enter a coma or a 'persistant vegetative state' with no hope of recovery, they are to pull the plug and donate my parts to someone who can actually use them.

Last edited by LKL on 15 Sep 2011, 9:35 pm, edited 1 time in total.

because, imho, then you look no better than the pro-life people who say arrogant, dismissive, nasty things about a woman's right to decide what to do with her body.

please keep in mind that I am pro-choice, and the comments that people like Inuyasha have made really tick me off. But I have to agree with MONKEY that "rude" and "vulgar" comments coming from the pro-choice side are no better.

Well yes actual personal attacks are wrong, but IMO honest expressions of horror like the spoon comment are fair game.

IMO, saying you'd dig it out with a spoon isn't really rude or vulgar. It's expressing horror at something happening to your body against your will.

In addition, I think women are quite right to be unabashedly angry at pro-life politics. If someone said that it was okay to do some medical procedure on you against your will, you'd be well within your rights to be rude about it.

i agree that is surprising that i considered you to be worthy of a worded reply, but it happened.





thank you, but i am sorry that i can not stoop low enough to kiss your sorry forehead goodnight.



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shut up ODD! stop!
i can not delete what i said even though i can see it was not right to say.

i just can not delete it, but if i did delete it, there will be no flak tomorrow from the target, but i still can not delete it.

i have to go now or else i will make a mess.

i really do not know how to talk.

The presence of human-like brain waves seems a rather arbitrary way of deciding whether it is morally acceptable to end somethings life or not.

A fetus may not have brain activity but it has lots of human characteristics, DNA, cells etc.
Whats makes brain function so special?

And note we are talking about non-conscious brain activity here, since we are comparing this to the possibility of killing someone who was unconscious (for example someone under the influence of a anasthetic drug).

and well you should be, but you should also be aware that you are incorrect about the spelling of "foetus". you seem rather silly to me. one should verify what one is saying before it is uttered.

the rest of what you said i am not going to respond to because i #617 b ..........errr where am i? how do i complete this sentence? i forgot where i was at in a social sense, my powerpack is warning me i have to recharge very soon.

good evening.

Because a functioning brain is the difference between 'person' and 'inanimate'.

Indeed, and so my question would be why is it morally wrong to kill something with a functioning brain (a person), and not morally wrong to destroy an inanimate mass of cells?

For example, an unconscious human being will not feel suffering if you kill him/her so that can't be the reason its morally wrong.

* Capability to think like a human, feel, suffer, etc.


It is perfectly legal to think all sorts of things that don't have a human brain. Case in point: Chicken, bacteria, cattle, rats, carrots.

Human DNA is not magical. Sperm have unique DNA. Skin cells are human cells. We get rid of that stuff all the time.


"Human brain wave" may be arbitrary but it is definitely the least arbitrary possible bound. Human DNA as a barrier between person and non-person just doesn't do it. There is no reason something as mindless and trivial as a zygote should get more rights than an actual human being.


There is a difference between a slightly disabled brain and a completely inexistent one.

Anyway, people in vegetative state, it should be perfectly legal to end their lives if they stated so and the family is willing. We keep flaunting the right to live, yet some people don't like to talk that we need a right to die a good death too.

But surely not while unconscious? Sure, there are perceptions and thoughts going on in the brain, but there is no "I" to be aware of them so I would argue that these thoughts are not particularly special.

The unconscious person has the capability to be conscious at some point in the future, but then again so does the foetus.



Another obvious bound would be conception. Now I agree that there is no real human-ness at this point, and to kill a small bunch of cells would be no more terrible than to pick an apple off the tree. However, I am suggesting it may be useful for society to define human-ness as beginning at this point because then the human life span is clearly defined (conception until whatever unfortunate thing kills you). Then we have a clear rule describing the time period in which it is wrong to take someone elses life. Otherwise, we have endless tricky moral conundrums along the lines of "Its wrong to abort a foetus after x weeks because after then we think it becomes conscious, but what if we're wrong and its actually earlier?.....oh and does that actually mean its ok to kill an unconscious person?".