No. Not right now. I was arguing that somebody’s did, then other people jumped in to discuss various points, and we ended up discussing the definition of personhood anyway (which is ok).
Where we appear to generate controversy is when it is dependent.
I argue that if you are big on the sanctity and protection of personhood/human life (Hi! RTF,) than the question of personhood becomes important for an abortion discussion from the pro choice perspective.
The question is important. A non-arbitrary bright line is not.
I follow you. How are you certain of these things though? What criteria are you using to ge there?
Which one?
Did you read the link I offered on the last page? I know this is going fast, so you may have missed it. Here it is again.
This is one reason why the existence of the identity in the matter of the body is so important. If the neurons aren’t forming connections, there’s no identity, no personhood.
I am as sure that a 20-week fetus lacks personhood as I am that a potato lacks personhood, and significantly surer than I am that an orangutan adult lacks personhood.
And I agree. If you can find a range that you can demonstrate would contain that bright line (should it exist and you could find it) than all you have to do is work outside that range to be safe.
Unfortunately you still have some of the same problems. You are now looking for a bright range, instead of a line. When you choose it, you still need justify the choice and explain how you arrived at it.
Please reread the post above yours, and visit the link.
It would seem posters have been trying to tell you that line of argument is irrelevant. Velocity thinks the only major rationale behind pro-life is religious. You haven’t attempted to address or examine the religious aspect of this debate (although QuickSilver dabbled in [POST=21733707]post #36[/POST]). Icerigger, iiandyiiii, Esprise Me, RitterSport, elbows, and DigitalC said personhood was irrelevant because the mother’s bodily autonomy supersedes the fetus’s right to life even if it had personhood. I think thorny locust holds that opinion too. I think Bryan Ekers takes a similar view, but I’m having trouble reading him - either way he says personhood is irrelevant. Ulfreida seems to take a utilitarian perspective, if the mother can’t support the baby it might be better to let her abort it and prevent potential suffering of the mother and the baby. You, QuickSilver, AHunter3, Delayed Reflex and I seem to agree with the conclusions from your OP (that human life is not “sacred”, and abortion is pragmatic). l0k1 didn’t express an opinion but said you were fighting a strawman (“the null hypothesis is the wrong one”). I think The Left Hand of Dorkness favors a sort of contract or anti-consent theory, the woman didn’t invite the fetus so the fetus has no right to stay, and I think GIGOBuster agrees (it is hard to tell from so few words). UltraVires’s participation in this thread is only to refute the analogy of traspess.
I might have misread people’s positions, after all I am relatively new here. But it doesn’t seem that anybody except you brought up the position that the fetus can be aborted because it is not a person.*
*That is, anybody except possibly SamuelA, whose rigorous criteria for personhood is dependent on future technology, but nonetheless thinks established technology indicates a fetus is definitely not a person. I think SamuelA would place personhood somewhere after birth.
~Max
This. We can’t be sure about whether and when personhood develops in the womb after 20 weeks, but a bunch of unconnected neurons does not add up to a brain, and no brain => no person.
Scylla: before that point, there is ‘human life’ in the biological sense: there is a biological entity, it’s animal rather than plant life, and it’s of the species homo sapiens. But there’s at least 20 weeks of gestation of ‘human life’ during which ‘personhood’ is unquestionably absent. An objection to treating the two as one and the same is necessary if we’re going to talk about this subject with any clarity.
I would like to add that SamuelA and I join Velocity in this observation.
~Max
Not really. I think the pro-choice argument has a few different components:
I may be leaving some out.
Any one of those arguments suffices on its own to keep abortion legal. A pro-life position must refute all of them.
I would call this a one-sided bright line. We know where the line is, and we know what’s true on one side of the line, but not both.
The line is at 20 weeks. Before that line, no personhood. After the line, we don’t know.
So if one’s objection to abortion is centered around personhood, then such a person should have no objection to it during the first 20 weeks of pregnancy.
Well, we disconnect people with heartbeats but no measurable brain activity. Surely that wouldn’t be permitted if a heartbeat alone determines viable personhood, a life worth saving.
We’ve already determined where the line is, measurable brain activity. A fetal heartbeat isn’t enough, using the very measure by which we disconnect patients from life support. How can heartbeat be the measure for the start of life, but lack of brain activity the. Easier for end of life?
That they’ve set the line arbitrarily at heartbeat, for fetuses, is all the proof necessary it’s NOT about consistency, or even science. I should think that much is clear.
Dorkness:
That’s a very good argument. It is essentially the same one that I alluded in my OP as having gone through with Gaudere way back in the day, and that I was satisfied with for 10 years.
For the sake of simplicity let me say that the argument can be restated as “when your brain has developed to the point where it is capable of having it’s first human thought, I can’t prove that you haven’t had that human thought. Having a human thought is the best criteria I have for personhood. Therefore, if I choose a time before the brain has developed enough to possibly have that thought to have an abortion I can be certain that I am not killing a person.”
I gave some reasons why I ultimately found it an unsatisfactory criteria there and I can give you more, if you like.
For me, it’s like this:
The moment an oak tree sprouts is like the moment a fertilized egg implants in the womb (I’ve said moment of conception before, I am just building an equivalence.)
Barring accident, or happenstance that sprout will now grow into an oak tree, even though it has almost none of the characteristics of its future self. They are there though, in that seedling. I think that if any time I kill it, I have killed an oak tree. I don’t call it an oak tree when it grows it’s first leaf or first acorn. That would be stupid.
It hasn’t done any oak tree things yet, so what’s the problem if there is one?
Well, what exactly is the problem with killing something? What’s the drawback? Be it ok tree or person, what exactly is the negative we associate with killing something?
Killing something doesn’t change anything that something was or has done, or even is. It only changes what it could do or become in the future.
Killing something terminates it’s future. All of something’s value, all of something’s potential is always in the future.
So I kill the oak when I crush the seedling because that was the seedling’s future. When you abort a fetus, you kill a person because that was it’s future.
We all agree it is ok to turn off the machine keeping somebody brain dead going because they have no future.
Killing something isn’t taking away what it is, it is taking away everything it was going to be. You have stepped on and stopped it while it was on its way.
It’s difficult to explain but that seems to be the gist of it. The more I think about it, the more right it seems.
Q. How did the pro-lifer order his chicken at the fundraising dinner?
A. Scrambled
I find it a profoundly unconvincing argument. First, you’re confusing human life with personhood. An oak tree is a biological entity, not a person, so it’s analogous to the fetus, not to the person.
That’s why I used the analogy about a painting instead: a painting is the material AS WELL AS the pattern on the material. What the canvas/pigments could become is not the same as what they actually are.
Potential personhood, and actual personhood, are not remotely the same thing. Deciding to protect potential personhood opens up all sorts of weirdness. Do we no longer prevent adolescents from having the sex they’d otherwise have? Do we ban contraception because it prevents the personhood that would otherwise develop? Can a woman justify abortion-on-demand when it’d otherwise be outlawed by taking a daily abortifacient, such that personhood lacks the potential to develop?
Killing a person is bad because you’re taking an existing person and ending them when otherwise they could continue. When there’s no existing person, there’s no killing.
I thought I did. I did a lot of arguing that suggests you can’t get the sanctity of life argument without religion. If you don’t have a value for the sanctity of life, you don’t have a moral objection to abortion.
So what did I ignore?
Fair enough. I can’t defend the religious arguments behind fetal personhood and counter to pragmatism, but I can at least refute bodily autonomy, if personhood is granted.
In [POST=21738922]post #195[/POST] I laid out a pro-life rebuttal to the bodily autonomy argument based on consent theory and assuming fetal personhood (or at least the right to life).
Posters have said the natural purpose of sex is not procreation, or that the natural purpose of sex is irrelevant. I find both of those arguments unconvincing because the issue is not whether the person actually wants to procreate, but whether a reasonable person should know that sex causes pregnancy. I cannot justify a negative answer to that question for consensual, unprotected sex.
Before we look at protected sex or contraception availability, I request your consideration of this proposal: if the fetus has a right to life, and if sex is consensual and unprotected, despite availability of nonabortive contraception, then barring serious medical complications the woman has no right to abort the fetus because the act of sex waived her bodily autonomy and therefore the fetus’s right to life prevails.
~Max
OK by me, not OK in general. If I had reason to believe his wife would die of a broken heart (taktsubo cardiomyopathy), and she can afford to keep the machine on or society says it is better to let her decide, by all means let her decide. If the decision was mine, and cost was not of concern (the machine is cheap and in their house), keeping Mr. Doe “alive” means his keeping his wife alive.
~Max
Religion aside, I agree with Left Hand of Dorkness on this matter. Consequentialism is subject to a variety of practical hurdles because you are making an uninformed decision. You don’t know what might be.
~Max
I’m open to arguments that bodily autonomy is not absolute. Maybe we should set up a mandatory bone marrow registry.
However, I reject the idea that it’s be because women waive their right to bodily autonomy. Are there any other cases in our society in which a person can, through the commission of a legal act, be understood to waive bodily autonomy? Is a dude who has unprotected sex and whose resulting child needs a bone marrow transplant obligated to provide it?