Are You a Good Person? Documentary that discusses this subject and Abortion.

Great Debates
221

Eh what magical nature is the 3rd trimester for you? Why not divide pregnancy into quarters? The definition I use is not arbitrary at all. Unlike some others, I don’t support the notion of some kind of nebulous sliding scale of personhood. Either you are or you aren’t. And birth and the cutting of the umbilical cord is the instant in which a fetus divides itself from the mother and starts living on his own. Before that, all nourishment comes from the mother’s host body.

Lost on this whole debate is the fact that the fetus loses nothing if it is aborted. It didn’t have a chance to have a life, so it doesn’t lose anything. Death is not a harm or a negative to a fetus because its never really known life.

222

Oh, I have far more arguments than that, involving economics and crime rates and whatnot, but since you’ve (rather comically) written off location as arbitrary, I have little confidence actual math will impress you.

In any case, I consider the location issue significant because I know that if I had an unwanted object in my body, I’d want the right to remove it. I suggested that you would, too, but then you got all “bwuh? uh? huh?” on me.

Hey, that’s great. Good for you. So having justified state intervention, should I ask what you had in mind? Fines? Jail terms? Executions?
Just kidding, you’ve never answered my questions about enforcement before, so I’ve no expectation you’ll do so now.

223

You could have fooled me though, to your credit, you did try the crime rate thing before.

Because it is.

When will you be providing some? Over the past few months you’ve made many claims that I’ve asked for proof of. Hopefully you’ll get around to presenting me an early Christmas present in the way of “actual math” (or cites, in general).

It’s a good thing that what you, as an individual, wants has no bearing on the moral/legal status of another.

If anything, I would have gotten all “How do you figure?” on you.

Well, since I can’t call you a liar in Great Debates, I’ll just point out that the above statement is untrue. I’ve answered your question on more than one occasion. But just to humor you (again), I’d be totally fine with returning to the status quo pre-Roe v. Wade.

224

In this thread, to you… no. It’s never had any effect before, I don’t see why it should, now.

Well, it’s a very good thing the Canadian government is aligned with me on this. We don’t have an abortion law, there’s no need to create an abortion law, and election campaigns don’t turn on vapid promises to reintroduce abortion laws. Further, there have been no negative consequences from the lack of abortion laws. I don’t know what it is about American culture that makes them think they need abortion laws. It must be something in the water.

And that would have been another stall for time. The sequence isn’t that difficult: posts 202, 205, 206, and by 208, you apparently forgot the contents of 202. You know, there are little blue and white arrows in the quotes linking back to the original posts, just in case one’s shot-term memory needs some help.

Hey, if you can link to a post of yours in which you seriously address how an abortion ban would be enforced and with what penalties, I’ll cheerfully withdraw the claim and apologize. Do you even know what the penalties were in pre-Roe states that banned abortion? Do you even care?

225

I didn’t bother watching the film because I am not a “good” person. I am selfish, short-sighted, always willing to put my comfort (and the comfort of my daughters) above the real needs of others, judgemental, pretentious and condescending. My only saving grade is that I am also too lazy to implement any schemes which might actively inconvenience others.

So, as I do not believe myself to be “good” (an opinion backed by most of the churches I have tried to attend over the past forty years) my opinion on abortion legislation would not be of any interest to the OP.

226

We’re like opposites, DrFidelius. I’m a good person who also helps terminate pregnancies sometimes!

The two of us together add and subtract to make the world a better place! LOL

227

I’ve never had to think much about the issue, not being a citizen of a country where it has any political traction, but on viewing both positions from the outside, as it were, this seems to be the best solution to a complex topic. Clearly, foetus = person is nonsense, but, just as clearly, the notion that abortion of an otherwise viable late term pregnancy is perfectly ok is nonsense too.

228

I think our OP has taken his Bible and gone home.

229

I agree with everything you say. My goal of proposing this hypothesis which I know no one believes is to help the pro life people under stand the perspective of the pro-choicers. The pro-life view is that the soul beings at conception and so killing a fetus is tantamount to murder and so any inconvenience to the mother is justified to protect the human life. The pro choice side is that what makes a person human occurs at a later stage and the control of a woman over her body is justification enough to destroy a blastocyst

Similarly the “pre-birthers” view would be that the soul begins at ovulation and so not fertilizing is tantamount to murder, thus any inconvenience is justified. The pro-lifer side will be that what makes a person human occurs at a later stage and so by allowing a woman destroy an ovum.

By having pro-lifers argue against the obvious absurdity of the premise, I am hoping that they will realize that any arguments that they use against the it could be used by pro-choicers against them. Further every argument that they use against the pro-chiocers could be used against them by the pre-birthers.

The only argument that is left is that humanness begins at conceptions because we say so. Which is basically arbitrary.

230

To my mind, basing the cut-off on capacity for conciousness has two benefits: (1) it can be defended scientifically; and (2) as a purely practical benefit, it in fact demonstrates the moral legitimacy (or rather, the lack of any objective moral issue at all) of the overwhelming number of real-life abortion decisions. As others have pointed out, third-trimester abortions are vanishingly rare and are in any event usually undertaken for medical reasons.

The arguments for conception and birth as the cut-offs have a similarity: both advocates pose their choice as being certain and logical. But the development from a buncha cells into a fully-fledged human is a gradual process.

231

Sorry, I’m not trying to be obtuse I assure you. I just don’t see a difference between;

Group A, anti abortion, denying me access to an abortion because they believe/perceive/are convinced abortion=murder.

Group B, anti meat eaters, denying you access to hamburger because they believe/perceive/are convinced meat=murder.

Are anti abortionists, willing to deny me access to one, willing to give up eating meat because someone else thinks it’s murder? Seems to me they ought to be.

For me, it comes down to the same issue. Your beliefs get to shape your behavior, but not everyone’s, just because you are convinced of their merit.

232

You cannot view that which does not exist.

Erm, it’s not. Either you did not read what I wrote out or you did not understand what I wrote out.

I would like to know what portion of my post this addresses.

I’m quite aware what I wrote out. What’s funny is that you do not (as per usual). I was even kind enough to point out to you in post #214 that you were were trying to argue against a point not made to no avail. Oh well. As I said then, you’re free to continue on arguing whatever.

A clip from a post made on 05-28-2011, 08:37 PM.

It’s amazing how big of a circle we go in.

*Or maybe it’s not, for I’ve seen Canadians capable of providing cites.

233

And this seems out of place hanging by itself. I wonder what happened to the asterisk part in my above post? I guess the board didn’t like it and ate it.

234

Look, I’m pro-choice, but this isn’t a killer argument. I accept the line drawn by “in my body/outside my body.” But similarly, it’s acceptable to draw a line between human and non-human that doesn’t depend on your view of whether abortion is murder.

235

Thanks, all, for the discussion. This is my first nuanced abortion related debate, and I have found the points put forth very interesting. Especially compelling to me were…

This made me think quite a bit. I don’t know if I have the right depth of philosophical background to adequately explain my position, but I’ll try. The distinction that I found most meaningful between the two situations is action vs. inaction. In my ethical view, when looking at a situation of competing rights, positive action which infringes on someones rights should be held to a higher standard. That is, taking action which results in a poor outcome is worse than failing to take action which would have presented a poor outcome.

In the case of the extra-uterine child, nature’s status quo is that the child dies. Positive action (kidney transplant, e.g.) can change that, but compelling it would infringe on the mother’s rights.

In the case of the intra-uterine child, nature’s status quo is that the child continues its free leeching of the mother’s organs. Positive action (abortion) can change that, but would infringe on the child’s rights.

I’m quite open to the idea that my reasoning may be flawed, or my perspective off. Please poke away.

[QUOTE=YogSosoth]
Eh what magical nature is the 3rd trimester for you? Why not divide pregnancy into quarters? The definition I use is not arbitrary at all. Unlike some others, I don’t support the notion of some kind of nebulous sliding scale of personhood. Either you are or you aren’t. And birth and the cutting of the umbilical cord is the instant in which a fetus divides itself from the mother and starts living on his own. Before that, all nourishment comes from the mother’s host body.
[/QUOTE]

I believe that personhood is an emergent quality of the human brain. A group of human cells may be a cancer, blatocyst, or person, depending on the complexity and nature of its brain. I agree that a ‘you are or you aren’t’ line needs to be drawn, but this line should be based on qualities of the brain, not on sources of nutrition or surrounding environment. The magical nature of the 3rd trimester is its alignment with development occurring around week 25 of embryonic age.

236

The issue is whether something actually is, objectively, the killing of a person. This is not a subjective determination in other cointexts, though the exact outlines of what is objectively allowable are not obvious and are tenaciously argued by all sides.

To give an analogy: reasonable people often differ on what exactly constitutes killing in self-defence. Yet no-one claims that the matter is entirely subjective. If I kill someone and claim self-defence, it is not sufficient for me to state to a judge, “in my opinion it was self-defence and my opinion is just as valid as yours. My belief gets to shape my behaviour”. The reason for this is obvious: in a killing, your belief is not affecting you alone, but another person - the one you killed - who would be unlikely to hold the same belief as you. Your belief, acted out in killing, has affected another person, by ending their life. Therefore, it must be justifed on an objective standard.

Of course, in the case of abortion, the whole issue is whether your belief has affected what amounts to “another person”. If no “other person” is involved, the decision is indeed a wholly subjective one - as stated, people toss out spem cells without a care. A clump of fertilized cells, the argument goes, is similarly “not a person” and equally can be tossed without a care. Hence, the desire for some sort of objective standard to judge when that clump of cells actually becomes a “person” invested with moral rights. To my mind, the key is what makes us truly human in the first place - capacity for conciousness.

The argument that meat = murder would therefore be a compelling argument if it could be demonstrated that animals possessed conciousness to the same degree as people, or at least, to a degree that should be protected with the same rights.

237

Dogs dream. Therefore, dog equals human. Right?

238

One might argue that defining consciousness is a little more complicated than brain activity during REM sleep.

239

Quick question, Trihs: In the “nine-months-long rape” scenario, who exactly is the “another” for whom the woman’s body is being forcibly and intimately used?

240

When my dog stops shitting in the yard, I’ll consider it.