And yet, this still doesn’t flow. Two plus two doesn’t equal five. Again, the decision to save one or another is not based in such simple terms as numbers. That doesn’t mean that one individual has any inherent worth less than the other. Again, I direct you to my question I asked, of which no one has answered yet
Under the care of a doctor is the keyword. No jurisdiction I am aware of investigates every single death.
What does policy have to do with solemnizing someone’s death? I’m sure I don’t solemnize everyone’s death-- only those whom I care about.
She seems to be doing a-okay. The bigger problems it the number of straw men coming from a certain side.
Seriously. I can count, at least, four in the past five or so pages.
Well, assuming you’re quoting (or at least reasonably paraphrasing) a real person accurately, that person is a stupid pro-choicer. Try honing your skills on a smart one, rather than crow over trivial victories.
What if they do? How does that change anything? If the intent, in using contraception, is to avoid pregnancy, why should anyone be saddled with an unwanted pregnancy they did everything they could to avoid?
Oh, but since the above would be the majority of pro-choicers, it’s not so trivial.
Though, I have to say, I’m quite shocked at the number of pro-choicers who haven’t come out trying to prove why the not-so-fictional conversation was a horrible mischaracterization of pro-choice beliefs.
For the same reason I’m going to get saddled with child support payments for a kid I might not have wanted.
Sure it does, or you need to come up with any, ANY logical reason that doesn’t violate her stated axioms why it should be any different.
Now who’s the sophist? A death under a doctor’s care is implicitly investigated by the doctor when he fills out the death certificate.
Wishing doesn’t make it so.
Again: why do you waste time defending her illogic? Is it so important to you that your side be right all the time?
And why’d you waste the time typing out that long-winded strawman of yours? Surely you could easily pull quotes from the thread and prove that viewpoint exists somewhere other than your own head?
Wow, does that come off as misogynist. “If I’ve got no choice in whether I’m going to potentially suffer, you bet your ass she doesn’t get a choice either.”
She said everyone has inherent worth. Please, explain to me how you would get from everyone having inherent worth to saving individuals based solely on numbers (which has little to do with abortion, since abortion is rarely about saving one of the other)?
I wasn’t aware that everyone dies under a doctors care.
Who’s wishing?
Is that what I’m doing? Here I thought I was responding to a rather intellectually dubious question.
(And why do you guys continue to refuse to answer my question?)
Long-winded straw man, you say? Is it a straw man? I’m sure that if you were to start at the top of page 22 or 23 (I believe it is), you would find numerous of your fellow pro-choicers spouting off some ignorance about the unborn not being humans (while calling someone else ignorant, mind you), and then later devolving their arguments into one of bacteria, cancer, tumors and the unborns not being persons. So where would you like to start?
You know there’s something wrong when expecting women to have the personal responsibility angle heaped upon them as it is men is deemed misogyny.
She has said more than that. She has said, among other things:
life beings at conception, and is fully human from that point on with full human rights.
no human life, regardless of status, has more inherent value than any other human life.
Thus, in a situation where it is equally easy to save one 5-yr-old or save five hundred embryos,
By 1), the embryos are fully human and have full human rights.
By 2), each embryo is as valuable as the five year old
By the problem statement, it takes equivalent effort to save all the embryos or the single child, but both cannot be saved.
By 2) and the problem statement, the embryos are worth exactly 500 times as much as the child.
Q.E.D. the right decision under those axioms is to save the embryos.
Certainly if you added axioms regarding the relative value of embryos and 5-yr-olds, or even dropped axiom 2, there wouldn’t necessarily be a straight logical solution. However, with both of the axioms presented, there is only one logical choice.
As for it’s unrelation to abortion, that’s nearly the entire point. If someone states an axiom and uses it to justify abortion, one can test the logical consistency of that view by assembling a scenario that doesn’t touch abortion but does touch on that axiom. If a person then appears to react to a non-abortion scenario in a way contrary to the axiom presented as justification for the abortion stance, we know that axiom doesn’t really apply in their minds.
You cannot be this stupid. If a person dies under a doctor’s care, the doctor investigates the cause of death. If a person dies not under a doctor’s care, the coroner’s office investigates the cause of death, and as necessary in either case the police investigate any possible criminal implications thereof. I think you’d be hard pressed to find a jurisdiction within the United States where a medical professional of some stripe DIDN’T investigate every body.
Which question? I already answered why it’s a no-brainer (because of classyladyhp’s stated axioms). I’ve responded to every question mark in that first post of yours.
If there’s a baby, both parents support it. No baby, no support. Abortion is completely unrelated to the personal responsibility involved in procreation.
Never mind, I realized you were referring to your incompletely specified elderly and newborns scenario.
I’d save whatever combination resulted in more lives being outside the building at the end of the scenario. If it’s one and one, I’m saving the newborn out of nothing but self-interest–the newborn is lighter and easier to carry. This question says nothing particular about me since I’ve asserted nothing contradictory. Rights don’t enter into your hypothetical, either. The question of “which combination of beings to save or damn” says nothing about my beliefs regarding their rights. As for worth, in a vacuum all humans who are independent persons have the same worth in the absence of any knowledge of their behavior–if the old guy was Hitler, yeah, he’s worth less than J. Random Newborn. A pragmatic decision to save many and leave one doesn’t say the one is worthless.
Presumably you’d ask such a hypothetical question to explore the edges of someone’s moral framework by comparing their previous statements to their response to this question. As a non-targeted question, it has no value whatsoever.
Of note, now that I’ve answered this, you’re welcome to make up further hypotheticals to try to catch ME in a logical contradiction.
I’m willing to concede you’ve had conversations along the lines you’ve described with some people around here, but this statement is a little too improbable for me.
And in any case, it fails to address conversations that don’t start with trying to define fetus as human or not human.
I daresay your degree of shock can’t be that strong. Besides, even stipulating that the transcript is a 100% accurate account of a conversation a pro-choicer and a pro-lifer once had, the pro-choicer is using a foolish argument. There are far better ones. I’ve used them.
I admit I haven’t read every post in this thread (don’t have the time!) but I don’t recall seeing any conversations in here that sound anything like this.
What question was that?
Well I suppose we could start with the fact (that I’ve seen, again haven’t read every post) that no one has said anything about torturing the fetus.
Just because that is an unfair issue doesn’t mean that men get to retaliate by forcing women to carry all pregnancies to term. Indeed, if you don’t want to get saddled, it would seem you would approve of an abortion of a fetus neither of you want.
classyladyhp says that “everyone” includes a fertilized egg, still sitting in the fallopian tube. People who do not believe that “everyone” includes anything other than actually living breathing humans tend to think it is better to save many than one, when the choice is between strangers.
The “unborn” are not necessarily human - how you view it all depends on what your personal decision on the subject is. Science (I think, if I remember the quotes right) find nothing tangibly human about it until it’s at least a month and more like two months along.
It is not ignorant to say that a fetus is not a human being, but it is ignorant to insist that everyone else agree that it is.
Both parents have obligations concerning child support but pregnancy is inherently gender imbalanced because only women can get pregnant.
The whole debate gets bogged down in silly arguments by proxy using endless, pointless, unresolvable definitional squabbling to try to sort out a substantive issue.
In my view the correct approach is to decide whether, when, where and by whom abortion should be lawful on substantive, rational and factual grounds and then make it so.
If that means it’s lawful or unlawful to abort what is named as a “person” or a “human” or a “human person” or a “baby” or a “fetus” or an “embryo” or a “clump of cells” or a “thing-analagous-to-a-tumour” or a “kalamazoo” then so be it. The name by which we call it should not be the basis upon which the law is made. It is a pre-occupation of inferior minds to take such arguments seriously.
If that means it’s only lawful for [“insert your favoured term here”] to be aborted by certain people or under certain circumstances or at certain times, then so be it. Laws that vary the lawfulness of an act depending on various additional factors are commonplace. It is a pre-occupation of simpletons to suggest that laws must maintain absolute consistency towards a particular thing for consistency’s sake and not draw distinctions based on other arguably relevant factors.
If the majority of pro-choicers argued as cluelessly as your example, I doubt abortion would ever have been legalized.
Meh, it’s a waste of time to even start with the whole “human/nonhuman, person/nonperson” mess. I’m still a little surprised anyone bothers, but it’s apparently very important to them for reasons that escape me.
Well, give post 1079 a shot, since classylady can’t or won’t.
Society doesn’t work that way. You don’t get to pick and choose the rules society determines that we live by, nor which ones your tax dollars go to fund.
I realize that society doesn’t work that way, but since you said your personal preference was that society change the rules to pay even more to support even more pregnancies, I was voicing my personal preference. Just seems fair that if you want to force women to carry every pregnancy to term, you and others who also want that should pay for it by yourselves.
You know, separation of church and state and all that?
You can also choose to force drugs into the fetus during pregnancy. I’d say that the fetus has less rights in that case. More in some areas, less in others.
BTW, I don’t have a problem with abortion up to the point of that 20-24 week region. I do have a problem with classifying the fetus as extraneous tissue until it’s outside the mother’s body.
I never said anything about forcing women to carry every pregnancy to term. That’s you making things up from whole cloth because it’s easier to polarize and then just argue with the hyperbolic version.
I object to both the notion that a fertilized cell is a person and the notion that a baby is a lump of tissue the minute before birth.
The notion that you get to pick and choose which parts of society you’re responsible for funding is absurd. It just doesn’t work that way. And asserting that if you change that one little thing that the balance sheet is then “fair” is lolworthy.
The way that you presented yourself with wanting a “full court press” on every pregnancy made it sound like you were anti-abortion. I see that in a later post you say that you don’t have a problem with early abortion, but also that I wasn’t the only person to misunderstand your position.
I haven’t read every post but I don’t believe that anyone has said that a baby is a lump of tissue the minute before birth.
What is, er, lolworthy is that I already said that I am aware that I cannot pick and choose, and I was very clear that I was answering the same way you presented the original premise - personal preference. Is it that you cannot follow the conversation, or that only you get to have a personal preference?
You see, your whole argument is based on the idea that a fetus is human, and when you deliberately kill an innocent human it is murder (which is false, actually, but never mind).
Yet you now suggest that abortion should be treated differently to murder. Which to me suggests that you don’t think of abortion as murder, and therefore that you don’t think of a fetus as having equal rights to a human.
To take this a little further - if you have a situation where absent an abortion, both the fetus and the mother will certainly die… I would hope you would support a right to abortion there.
Now let’s alter it a little bit. If we have a situation where if the fetus is aborted, the mother will survive, but if the fetus is not aborted, the mother will die, but the fetus will live. Would you support a right to abortion there? If so - why?
What about a situation where absent the abortion the mother will die, but the fetus stands a 10% chance of survival despite the mother’s death. Should the mother have a right to abort?
