You mean a fetus? Better to kill it than to let it be born to a mother who doesn’t want it.
It’s more of a “Becoming a parent should be a choice” argument.
A toddler can be put up for adoption. A fetus can’t.
Good enough reason for me to have an abortion if I were the mother: I honestly don’t know, I’ve never been in that position; nor, since I’m male, am I likely to be at any point in this lifetime.
Good enough reason to butt out and refrain from interfering if a woman decides to get an abortion for the specified reason? “Because she wants to”.
If right-to-lifers wish to push for a bill that says the fetus or baby must be kept alive after removal from the uterus under circumstances where we have the technology to do that, I think that would be reasonable as long as increased risks to the mother’s health are not substantial. The important right possessed by the mother is the right to not be pregnant, not the right to prevent the fetus from remaining alive.
Then you can make appropriate analogies to adoption.
How do you figure that?
Were Andrea Yates’ children better off because she murdered them when she did than if she had waited 5 years to do it?
In at least 98% of the cases, that’s exactly what it is. What you’re advocating is tantamount to the right to renig on a contract in which at least one life is at stake.
That’s a practical consideration, not a moral one.
**But piercing your ears doesn’t necessarily lead to killing another living entity. Do you really hold that regardless of how trivial an effect something might have on you, so long as there is *any * effect you get to make a decision that kills a child that could be delivered?
If so, let me take you back to your initial answer. Suppose the child could be teleported from your womb (indulge me again, please), but he’s severely handicapped. So, it’s possible to no longer have this burden on your body, but you do have a living infant that you have to deal with, whether that is to transfer custody somehow or whatever. Do you still get to say, no, I’d rather just kill him?
I’m not trying to belabor this, really. I’m just trying to triangulate to what the moral lever seems to be for some pro-choice folks. I promise I won’t expand the hypothetical to include spaceships or violinists ;). (Where’s beagledave? I know how he loves hypotheticals.)
Frankly, I don’t see how you could answer the first question and not understand where this was going, but, OK, whatever. I can’t think of another way to phrase what seems to me a given in the hypothetical (Mr2001 seems to have responded similarly). Oh well.
Basically, yes. Of course childbirth wouldn’t be trivial, and I don’t consider abortion to be killing a child anyway.
Assuming Junior really could be teleported? Where one minute I’m pregnant, one minute I’m not, without me actually having to do anything (or have anything done to me)? I don’t think I would object to abortion being illegal under those circumstances. It’s hard to say for sure given the complete impossibility of it ever becoming reality, though.
**If another woman decided differently and the baby was delivered, would it somehow become a child? I understand (but don’t agree with) the argument about “my body, my choice, under any circumstances.” But how would this not be a child simply because he was not born, if he would be a moment later? And if the delivered baby is not a child, what is he?
I hear ya. Thanks for being a sport and answering. I appreciate it. You are at the very least consistent in your beliefs.
Evidently you believe, then, that a fetus is not a human being five minutes before birth, but that it is immediately after. Care to say why?
Non sequitur. She killed her children after they were born.
Contract? What are you talking about?
What I said was “becoming a parent should be a choice”. If she wanted to become a parent, why would she want an abortion?
Stratocaster and yguy, it’s very simple.
Pre-birth = fetus.
Post-birth = child.
And mothers who have abortions kill them before they are born. What is the substantive difference?
A woman who has intercourse of her own free will implicitly takes on the risk of pregnancy. If conception occurs, there is a human life within her, which, again, she has implicitly agreed to provide a safe haven for. Since it may be presumed that that life will not willingly let her out of the “contract”, she’s on the hook for it.
If I go out driving on an icy road at night to get a sixpack, and I wrap my car around a telephone pole, did I want that to happen? No, I wanted a sixpack. Who is to blame that I got the other besides me?
If you mean to be insolent, you’re doing fine. What part of this answers my question?
The difference is the availability of alternatives. A born child can be put up for adoption immediately; a fetus cannot.
Wrong. She didn’t implicitly agree to provide a safe haven, only to the possibility of becoming pregnant.
Pregnancy is one possible outcome of sex, and delivery is one possible way to deal with pregnancy. Abortion is another possible way. When she chose to have sex, she accepted the risk of becoming pregnant, but she didn’t choose how she would resolve the pregnancy.
There’s a difference between setting a chain of events in motion, and agreeing to one possible outcome. You didn’t agree to wreck your car, and if you were offered the choice of whether or not to wreck, you’d be perfectly justified in choosing not to.
If you go skiing, you accept the risk of breaking your leg. That does not mean you don’t get medical treatment, because you agreed to some “implicit contract” to spend the rest of your life with one leg.
If you move your TV from the living room to the basement, you accept the risk that you might accidentally drop it. However, if you do drop it, you aren’t obligated to deal with the broken TV any particular way - you can buy a new one, you can go without a TV, or you can try to fix it. Insisting that a woman who has sex automatically agrees to deliver a baby is as silly as insisting that when you drop your TV, you automatically agree to buy a new one.
Well, presumably you’d agree that birth is the cutoff point for it to be considered a fetus, right? After birth, it’s definitely not a fetus. By the same token I consider birth the starting point for it to be considered a child.
::sniffs armpits::
::checks shoulders for dandruff flakes::
Umm, so I guess the questions implicit if one could keep all aborted fetuses alive (either in artificial wombs or by implanting them in the bodies of consenting people) were not of interest?
AHunter3 wrote:
i hope you realize the mysogeny inherent in this notion. it’s a sorry reflection of the same idea that runs through the whole anti-choice movement. giving a thing that’s never even had a memory nor made what we could reasonably consider a choice more rights than an adult woman is absurd to me, and requires more than a little lack of compassion for the fairer sex.
as to what makes something a child after birth and a fetus before birth, it’s based on the rights it gains socially. in my estimation, when the fetus is part of the woman’s body, it is part of the woman’s body. no member of society should have a right to coerce a woman to make a certain medical decision regarding her body. when the child is born, society gains the right to value that child implicitly, so the child gains implicit value. a fetus has no implicit value as a person. it simply isn’t a person.
as far as outlawing abortion should the possibility exist to noninvasively remove the fetus from a pregnant woman, i think that would be just as bad as outlawing abortion with no nonsurgical alternative. to me, it is inherently bad to let laws make medical decisions for people. that said, i would certainly be more against the act itself, given that alternative, but i think the law still has no place there.
Again, this is not a moral consideration. The humanity of the fetus hardly depends on what options are available to the mother.
Ah, but I WAS offered that choice. Realizing the risk, I could have stayed off the highway.
Sexual intercourse is unique among human activities in that it brings new life into the world. Your analogy would fit if medical treatment consisted of killing someone, stealing their leg and attaching it to me, so that the solution to my problem comes at someone else’s expense.
Again, my TV is an inanimate object. If I choose to fill it full of buckshot just because, I have committed no crime.
This is all semantics. Neither is a child an adult, nor a Down’s syndrome victim a Nobel Prize winner; but all are human beings. Kindly tell me what basis you have for thinking a fetus five minutes before birth anything but a human life.
Surely you’re aware of the difference between saying something is not a child, and saying it’s not a human life. You’re asking him to justify something that he hasn’t said.
Pick a term and stick with it. Human life does not neccessarily mean human being. Human being does not neccessarily mean person ( thought these may be closer, and counter examples are harder to find). None of them neccessarily mean child.
Apart from the fact that I’m a “she”, WaryEri’s right.