ABORTION

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Without trying to come across all emotional my brothers girlfriend is pregnant and the earliest picture i seen was about eight weeks and it looks like a life to me with a head, hands feet etc so i refuse to believe anyone who says they dont feel pain when they are aborted after this point.

In this day and age there are couples that would take the baby anyway so i dont see the need for abortion in most circumstances.

But pain isn't a function of having hands and feet, it's a function of having a developed nervous system, and a fetus at eight weeks doesn't have a nervous system remotely like an adult human's, or even an infant's.

The issue is not whether the fetus is "a life" or whether it experiences anything; a cow is a life and it experiences pain when it is killed, yet we eat hamburgers all the time. Are you a vegan? If not, your position is somewhat inconsistent, since you don't mind taking a life and causing it pain just to put food on your plate.

The only rational criterion to use is not whether the fetus is alive, but whether the fetus possesses the quality of personhood. What are the relevant differences between an eight-week-old human fetus and an eight-week-old cow fetus? What makes one worth protecting and the other not?

Jeremy

Do you eat meat? Have you killed any living thing? If not then i suppose you position inconsistent if you think murderers should be put in jail but not you. I hardly think a cow's life equates to a human's though if i was in power id make more financial incentives towards vegetarianism to make it easier to have a healthy vegetarian diet without taking a lot of time and expense.

Im not an expert on the matter but i would severely doubt that these babies dont feel pain when aborted. I personally dont think killing them is something i could go through with or support in this day and age when support is available.

I'm not sure I follow. Can you rephrase or clarify?



I don't either, but I don't think a several-week-old fetus's life equates to an (adult) human's, either. Personhood, in my opinion, is a function of having a distinctly human-like brain, and a first-trimester fetus simply doesn't. Biologically speaking, there is very little, other than gross anatomy, to separate a human fetus from any other mammal's.

What are your criteria for personhood? What quality does a first-trimester human fetus possess that makes it qualitatively different from an animal?

Jeremy

Replace the "not" with "so".

Which is one reason why, as of right now, I can see why it is difficult to justify.

One could say that the baby has its own right to live, and then we'd either be arguing over which right has supremacy or over what rights the baby should and should not have.

But the procedure I vaguely describe below would give a third option that respects the same rights of privacy for the woman that abortion does WITHOUT requiring the baby's right to life (if it has one) to be sacrified. In this case I think disallowing abortion in favor of the other procedure is justified.



I never said "forcibly removing" is a good idea. Abortion removes a fetus from the woman but kills it in the process. I'm thinking about a process which is the same but manages to keep the embryo alive - but of course it is her choice if she wants to get it removed or wants to have it the natural way. (And only during the procedure's infancy, when the technology is still experimental, abortion could possibly be the 3rd option that would be phased out slowly as the technology matured.)

Once the embryo is out, it is no longer a "medical decision" regarding the woman what is done with it - it's not a part of her body anymore it is undeniably a separate entity. From here one can argue it is a piece of tissue that has no rights and can be thrown away (to die) or a human baby with the right to exist. At this point, with this choice, I think it is better to err by assuming it is a baby.

No, because I don't think killing an animal is on the same level as killing a human being. An animal is not self-aware.

That's not to say I think there's nothing wrong with it, however. I would like to see animals treated more humanely in general.

Jeremy

I dunno, hopefully this wont be something that affects me (i dont think it has so far but being a man i cant be sure) because the thought of having a kid or one of my kids aborted are both ideas that fill me with horror.

My first girlfriend has used the morning after pill a couple of times before she was on the pill and i wasnt too keen on using a condom. I didnt think this (using a morning after pill) was controversial or contested at the time but have found out different since.

Abortion is very old, much older than surgery or medicine. In a realistic perspective, abortion will go on whether or not it is legal. The problem we have then is women giving self-abortions and potentially endangering their lives as well.

It's safer to make it legal. Kind of like it's safer to make certain kinds of drugs legal because making them illegal allows for impure drugs to come onto the market and potentially endanger lives even more than the pure form of the drug would. Heroin is an excellent example of this.

Sorry, slight topic derailment there.

In the olden days there was no or little welfare and it brung great shame and even made a life much harder to live if you had a baby out of wedlock. None of these are issues so much so im not sure very many woman would try abortion if it was ilegal.

Drugs are different because the people that are addicted will do anything. I dont think drugs should be legalised either in general but agree that there should be real funding put into the drugs issue, how harmful or not it is and how much it would benefit society to legalise it are contested issues that deserve more contemplation.

there are two individuals' rights at stake in this situation. personally, i would not sacrifice the rights of a person for those of another that is not even aware of its own existence.

So in other words, you are in favor of killing someone who has no say in anything going on just because some dumb [edited] didn't use birth control and her dumbass SO didn't use protection. Those kinds of kids probably don't have a DNA sequence that makes their life look promising, but they do deserve a chance. If they use their chance at life for violent crime, there's always capital punishment because then you have a good argument to kill them.

Last edited by Sean on 30 Dec 2005, 3:58 pm, edited 1 time in total.

You really can't envision a situation in which someone might want an abortion without her being a "dumb slut" who didn't use birth control? Many abortions involve women who used birth control conscientiously. The problem is that most forms of birth control, even the pill, have a mean time between failures which is shorter than a woman's reproductive years. Even using birth control, the odds are fairly high that a sexually active woman will have at least one unintended pregnancy in her lifetime.

And "killing someone" presumes personhood. Are you prepared to explain why a first-trimester fetus should be considered a person with legal rights? Should a single fertilized egg cell be considered a person? If not, at what point does personhood begin, and why?



This indicates you don't understand the argument. The argument is not that killing people is acceptable, it is that fetuses do not possess the qualities required for personhood.

Also, it is typically anti-abortionists who favor the death penalty. Funny, that, since they are usually adamant about the "right to life."

Jeremy

The Republic of Ireland has a good mix of liberalism and abortion being illegal.

*standing ovation*


if the people in your scenario are as irresponsible as you make them sound i think it would be in everyone's best interests (including the theoretical child's) if they didn't become parents.

an adult cat is more intelligent and has a better developed nervous-system than a human fetus- but you have boasted about shooting cats purely for fun.

Last edited by hecate on 30 Dec 2005, 2:36 pm, edited 1 time in total.

An interesting idea, should the father have a say in whether there is an abortion or not?