My apologies. As I think that it’s neither of these I’ll bow out.
If the soul enters the body at any time does that mean when a person dies it is different than an animal? It would seem that when a person dies it is no different than when life leaves the animal. So how can anyone state in truth that there is a soul in a human and say animals do not.
Life is just that life. The sperm of all animals even human males contain life,human life.
If a country has a law against abortion there should also be a law the makes all people responsible for the up-bringing of any child that is conceived, not just throw a few dollars in a basket once in awhile, but make the real sacrifice as to raising the child through adulthood. I know many so called pro-lifers that do not want to pay taxes or are they willing to support the child of someone else,nor do they offer free baby sitting,feeding, clothing, educating etc. I call them pro-birth as once a child is born they think they did there job.
Monavis
I don’t see how that logically follows. Right now, the law recognizes that parents have a unique obligation to raise their own children; in other words, the law provides a system by which the children are to be taken care of. This is true regardless of whether abortion is legal or not.
If we ban abortion, how does this logically imply that all of society must now shoulder the burden of raising each and every child? I don’t think that there is any logical connection between the two conditions.
But that does not make the sperm cell a unique, living organism.
Therein lies the problem. You’re using “life” in the broadest sense, referring to any living cell. In the context of the abortion issue though, “life” pertains to the life of a living organism. No rational person – whether pro-life or pro-choice – argues that every single living cell must be preserved. The issue is whether the target of abortion is a living human being or not, not merely whether it is “alive” in the broad sense of the term.
I hope you won’t bow out. As I said, I too think it’s neither of those. The idea of the thread is to use analogical techniques to find labels that are more suitable. Again, I think “pro-abortion” and “anti-abortion” are about as good as we can do, granting a continuum of exceptions and hedges to both sides.
For example:
“I’m pro-abortion, but I draw the line at partial birth abortions.”
Or:
“I’m anti-abortion, but not if an abortion is necessary to save the mother’s life.”
I think that those kinds of labels put an end to the extrapolations about choice and life that go way outside the area of medical abortions.
This is assuming your religious devotion is primarily erring on the side of caution.
As has been mentioned, both terms are better suited for bumper stickers than determining ideologies. I have probably raised the anti-abortion/pro-death penalty ‘contradiction’ in the past, but will cease to do so (imagine that! Thanks, SDMB!). Though I do think there is something to be said for pro-lifers who give little thought to the quality of the life they are so gung ho about.
Well, if you’re not sure whether something is murder or not, I can’t think of a good reason to assume it isn’t. It’s not like pregnancy is some horrible thing-- it’s a normal biological state that only rarely poses a risk to the mother. Given the choice between being pregnant (a normal biological state that rarely is a danger to the mother) and risking the damnation of my immortal soul (plus the who-knows-what outcome for the soul of the “baby”), I can’t see how I’d choose the latter. Again, the consequences of those two choices are so monumentally different in magnitude that they defy comparison.
Now, that doesn’t mean I’d enforce that moral code on other people-- I’m just talking about what I would do, myself, if I were a Christian.
I just wanted to say that people like you are what this board is all about.
No, I think the real issue is that given we seem to be able to come to agreement on this issue on factual grounds, what choice should we allow people who have very different opinions on this issue? Given that I can’t convince you, it would be wrong of me to support government coerced abortions. Given that you can’t convince me, I’d say it would be wrong for you to back the banning of something I feel is quite legitimate. If I became convinced that an angel came down to me telling me that abortion after a second child was a sacrament, I’d still be wrong trying to make you follow that view.
I don’t even want to try to convince you - all I want is for this to be my choice (or, more properly, the choice of the women involved.)
The problem is that coercion is in the eye of the beholder. A business owner might not see hiring children as coercion, but might consider child labor laws as the government oppressing him. Are regulations about mortgages more coercive than companies writing crappy mortgages for people who aren’t skeptical or smart enough to disbelieve the assurances that rates will always be going down?
On the other hand, spanking is an example of the string coercing the weak - but I have great misgivings about anti-spanking laws.
I was specifically addressing monavis’s assertion that “Life is just that life. The sperm of all animals even human males contain life,human life.” My point is that this broad claim, while technically correct, is irrelevant. It does not use the term “life” in a manner that is relevant to the issue of abortion.
You say that we should determine what choice we should allow people who have differing opinions on this matter. At the risk of sounding disrespectful, I’d say, “Duh!” That’s ultimately a truism; it’s true of any moral issue.
Some people believe don’t see a problem with killing their cheating wives, but that doesn’t obligate us to accommodate their position. Some – a great many, in fact – once believed that blacks should be enslaved, but that didn’t obligate society to accommodate their position. The presence of differing opinions is inevitable, but it doesn’t obligate society to accommodate those points of view.
Saying “what choice should we give people who have very different opinions?” makes for a great soundbite, and some politicians toss it about all the time. Ultimately though, while we can acknowledge these disagreements, the presence of disagreement alone should not stop society from doing what is right.
That gets into theories of liberalism which I’m unwilling to get into deeply here. Suffice it to say (and I think you would agree) that a parent-child relation is fundamentally different than a stranger-child relation, and a child is incapable of giving meaningful consent. It is therefore impossible for the stranger to secure the child’s consent to work (since it doesn’t exist). Additionally, a parent has no more right to coerce his child than he does to coerce anyone else, and so cannot force the child to work for the stranger. But not all force is coercive (i.e., initial). Responsive force is often necessary to train or protect a child (or someone else, for that matter).
But I do agree with what you said to JThunder, and I believe it is in fact the official position of the Libertarian Party platform.
I’m not talking about the opinions of a few. There are sociopaths, whose opinions need not be considered. I think it is safe to say that we have a very broad consensus that killing spouses is not correct - with the possible exception of killing abusive ones.
Now, if 99.9% of the American public thought abortion was an outrage, we’d have a consensus and a ban no doubt. I think you have to agree that we have no such consensus.
But what is right? Large chunks of society think premarital sex is wrong, but large chunks don’t, so it is not illegal. Abortion, like this and unlike SSM, is something government only needs to keep its nose out of. When I was a kid people forged their names on hotel registers to pretend they were married to the woman they were taking up. It happened, and abortion happened, but it was secret. I acknowledge that most people are more upset about abortion, but I think fundamentally it is the same problem.
I do agree with you. My point was that we need some subtle ethical reasoning to figure out who is coercing who, and how to balance rights. The broad principles are fine, but I think traditional libertarianism breaks down when we get into the details.
I believe that the abortion debate hinges solely on the question “When does a fetus become a person?”.
If it’s at conception, then being pro-life and pro-death penalty are not inconsistent.
If it’s at birth, then being pro-choice and anti-drug use are not *necessarily * inconsistent (if you believe that there are some things that are so bad for society that people should not be allowed to do them).
“When does life begin” is not just one of many aspects of the abortion debate. It is ultimately the only one. IMHO
!!!
I agree that that is the great ethical question (as opposed to a moral one), which is exactly why I’m ambivalent about the ethical implications (as stated in the OP). Who is to decide the answer to that question? Science? How? Science hasn’t even defined “life” to everyone’s satisfaction. How will it define “person”? Will politicians do it? Encoding it in legislation? If so, God help us. I don’t know the answer. It is one of the most perplexing puzzles I’ve ever encountered.
The question itself is the puzzle, or who will decide it is the puzzle?
That is also true of every philosophy. It therefore does not set liberalism apart from any other political view in that regard.
Even with those hedges, I don’t think the term “pro-abortion” is a good one. Consider: are you and all libertarians pro-heroin? Pro-suicide? Pro-horrible-working-conditions?
The fact that a person believes the law should not prevent something does not mean that they are in favor of it. A vanishingly small minority of pro-choice folks are actually in favor of abortions (The Voluntary Human Extinction Movement and The Church of Euthanasia are the only exceptions I know of).
I agree that pro-choice is not a good term, any more than pro-life is a good term. We need something equivalent to the terms used around Prohibition. Only I don’t know what those terms are, either :(.
Daniel
“Anti-abortion” and “pro-abortion rights.”
I can’t think of any way to make the terms exactly symmetrical, since I don’t think the philosophies are exactly symmetrical.