People keep focusing on a couple who is using birth control accidentally getting pregnant as their prime example.
I bet that in the U.S., if you add up all of the couples who use birth control, and add up all of the couples who don’t use birth control, what do you think those numbers would be like?
Let’s say 50 couples use birth control compared to 1 couple who does not, and birth control is 99% effective. Won’t you have twice the incidence of pregnancies in people who chose to not use birth control?
I bet the numbers aren’t as big as 50 to 1, just based on empirical observation of our people.
nice try, but you gave actually no real arguement for belief that personhood comes along with brainwave activity.
And of course criticizing my statement concerning abstinance does nothing to combat it. My statement was true and you know it, so you have to attack it without arguing against it.
Everything you say is of no matter essentially. The issue is clear. If the fetus deserves treatment like a person than we treat it just like we would a new born baby. Every one of your arguments above is a red hearing.
I do not know if it should be illegal. I am hesitant in getting the government involved at all in anything, because I do not think it would solve anything. But like I said above, erring on the side of caution when it could be murder, seems to be the sensible thing to do. Because of this I would caution all my friends who were in such a situation to forgo the option of abortion.
Der Trihs doesn’t favor that position, so it’s not particularly damning that he’s not arguing for it.
You might as well argue for sterilization or pedophilia or sodomy. They work, sure, but only for certain values of “work” that aren’t valid options for most people.
“Abstinence only” didn’t work for Mary. :rolleyes:
I wouldn’t support forcing someone to provide their body to keep a newborn alive, either.
Do you use any products made of or from living things?
It doesn’t; it’s just that you can’t have personhood without it.
It was a sexist, woman hating statement. It was “true” the way that saying that women can avoid being bothered by men ogling them if they gouge out their own eyes is “true”.
And if your dog is made of plutonium we should put it in a lead box under guard. But it’s not made of plutonium, so we don’t; just as a fetus is not a person, so we shouldn’t treat it like one.
You are NOT “erring on the side of caution”; you are “erring” on the side of oppressing and harming women. Which of course is the real point of the anti-abortion movement.
I asked this question of the pro-life contingent in another thread:
It was a hijack, so I didn’t really expect an answer, but looking at those numbers, I don’t think we’re going to come up with 788,000 adoptive parents per year.
You will be held accountable for your actions. Should you choose not to justify them, you will still be held accountable.
Except in the case of abortion, there is disagreement over whether harm is being caused to someone other than the person making the decision.
“Your right to swing your arms ends where my nose begins” is a moral judgment. Conflicts between the rights of one against the rights of another rely on moral judgements of the relative value of each set of rights.
Uh, if she used contraception, that is an indication that her will was to remain not pregnant. The contraceptive failing is counter to her intentions.
There is no parallel because men cannot be pregnant. It is, therefore, men who are second class citizens, because they cannot enjoy the privilege of carrying and delivering a baby.
If we kill off some old people, we’ll have room for them.
Yet, no disagreement over whether harm is being caused to the person making the decision. And while the debate is often couched in “think of the children” terms, it seems like the concern is really more about whether the person making the decision deserves to be harmed.
I disagree. My nose rights don’t supersede your arm rights. I’d be the one at fault for nosing you in the fists against your will just as much as you would be if you punched me in the face. It’s just kung-fu nose-to-fist style isn’t particularly common. It seems that it’s less about whether one right supersedes another and more about who initiated the conflict.
Which is fairly abstracted from the specific topic of abortion. I’m not sure how that reasoning would be applied. Probably part of the reason for the debate.
I wish every woman considering abortion would have the child and give it to gay/lesbian couple. That would cause some anti-abortionists’ heads to explode.
Many (most?) of them are only for adoption by the “right” couples. Something I point out to the people being harrassed by them outside our local Planned Parenthood.
If you justify yourself, the accountability may be different. I guess we’re disagreeing over what it means to have a duty.
Well, I am not arguing the person making the decision deserves to be harmed. I am talking about the status of the fetus. Does the fetus deserve to be harmed?
Can you not see that that is a moral judgment? “Initiating a conflict is wrong” is a moral judgment.
In addition to the point you raise, it is important to consider two additional items. Those being that doctors are often extremely unwilling to (and can be downright hostile to the idea of) perform a surgical sterilization on any woman under a certain age, or who is not married, or who does not already have some number of children. The second of these factors is that surgical sterilization has an effective rate of something less than 100%, and when it comes to tubal ligation, that effectiveness rate is actually lower than that of properly used birth control pills.
Laws in the United States should not be based upon religious viewpoints. To make a ‘sin’ a crime purely because it is a ‘sin’ is the height of establishment of religion.
So what’s the recourse then? Remember that adoption is not an alternative to pregnancy.
Can a fetus be harmed in a way significantly comparable to a person? Does it even make sense to talk about whether a fetus “deserves” anything? If we ascribe rights to a fetus, is it then responsible for its actions and any harm it causes? If it cannot have responsibility or accountability, how can it have rights?
There’s really no point in defining “good” vs. “bad” in operational/functional terms to show “conflict is bad” as an observation and not a moral judgment, since you can just come back with “Function is right (malfunction is wrong) is a moral judgment.” We just end up splitting hairs over axiomatic vs. tautological and/or “what is” vs. “what should be” and/or the scaling problem.
At some point we agree, and can work our way in from there.
That’s what people say when they believe that the unborn is merely part of the woman’s body, as opposed to being a distinct but physically connected organism.
No, it’s true either way. I’m a “distinct organism”; if I had massive organ failure and it was possible, would it be OK for me to have a woman forcibly hooked up to me as a life support system ? Of course not.
I can only guess the fetus:infant analogizing keeps coming up because people imagine it’s a “gotcha!” or simply can’t be arsed to read the thread(s).
Making a conservative argument, you can extend “personhood” downward into the grey area to the moment of birth. Making a conservative argument, you can extend “non-personhood” upward into the grey area to the moment of birth.