OK, here is something that I have never gotten a good answer from a pro life apologist about. Suppose I have the firm belief that the soul is contained in the human egg, and so that life begins at ovulation. Every time a woman has a period a child dies. Based on this a advocate that all woman of child bearing age should remain constantly pregnant. Ideally this is done with a willing partner but it could be done artificially if necessary. While there is some inconvenience to the woman this is minor in comparison of forbidding life to the child that would not exist if it wasn’t conceived.
How do the pro life group argue that this view is wrong yet their view in unimpeachable? Is it merely because I haven’t gotten enough converts to agree with me?
As I made clear from my very first post in this thread, I support a woman’s right to an abortion. That doesn’t mean that I think we should ignore what the anti-abortion arguments actually are.
Nobody actually holds this view. Creating bizzare hypotheticals is hardly going to convince anyone of anything.
How about this, at the other end of the process: if aborting a baby in the womb is okay, why can’t I throw a newborn out with the trash? What’s so magic about passing through a vagina that transforms a moral nothing into a person?
These are all ways of getting at the fact that at one end of a gradual process - transformation of some cells into a human - the products have no moral worth, and at the other end, they do. If a guy ejaculates into a kleenex, he flushes millions of potential people without the slightest qualm; OTOH I doubt even the most adamant pro choice person would get behind infanticide as a lifestyle option. Somewhere between those two is the cut-off - anti-choice types make in conception. My own view is that it is capacity for conciousness.
I suppose one could argue that abortion destroys a potential future life. An entire possible future, with untold, limitless possibilities.
It isn’t a stupid argument. Kind of weak, though, given that the child would be unwanted: the potential is impugned from the beginning. Also, it isn’t as if there is any shortage of children in the world, or that new ones are really all that difficult to produce. The future of humanity is not imperiled by abortion.
What if he grows up to be Beethoven? Well, what if he grows up to be Charles Manson? We don’t know. The potential is limitless, for good or ill. The next kid to come along will be Beethoven…or Manson. Or somewhere in the middle…
Exactly. There are lots of things people believe that they believe…even to the point of taking contradictions at face value. They don’t see the contradictions.
(One of my very favorite examples of this kind of weirdness is when a vast majority of poll respondents say, “I disapprove of Congress…but approve of my own local Congressman.” Individually, it makes sense, but collectively, it is contradictory.)
Right: that’s why we have to understand that opposition to abortion is wholly about wanting to punish women for having sex, and not about any belief that it’s murder. Misunderstanding it as the latter is doing yourself a disservice.
…billions of people the world over have united in a sinister conspiracy whereby they lie about their true intentions in order to advance a nefarious plot. Mwahahahahaha.
Attempting to assign a horrific “true” motivation for a position you are arguing against is the very weakest of ad-homs. Who are you attempting to convince with it?
It’s the only way any of it makes sense. For the most obvious example, why would people who think abortion is murder be so vigorously opposed to the sex education and contraception that would nearly eliminate abortion? The only way the actual actions of pro-lifers make sense is in the light of the “women should be punished for having sex” position. Trying to decipher their actions as those of people who believe abortion is murder leads to incoherence.
If you want to put it that way, sure. I consider anti-abortion activism pretty nefarious, and they are indeed miscommunicating their intentions, though again, whether they themselves consciously realize it (are “lying”) is essentially irrelevant.
I don’t understand why the notion that a large group of people are doing an evil thing is automatically false. Not everyone has good intentions, not everyone is a good person. That’s reality.
Because they believe that sex should only be for procreation so contraceptives are wrong, that only parents should teach their children about sex so sex ed is wrong, and that abortion is murder so it’s still wrong.
Oh, wait, no, it’s because they’re part of a global conspiracy devoted to stamping out abortion through dishonesty. It all becomes clear now.
Well, for one, not every person holds those views simultaneously. Plenty of people oppose abortion but not sex education or birth control.
Where they do, it is possible and indeed probable that they spring from (say) religious convictions - the same religion that teaches that life begins at conception may also teach that sex is for procreation only.
Conflating a bunch of views that tend to be held by the same people together to deduce a horrific motive is a weaksauce attack. It certainly won’t convince them, and probably will not convince others.
Not that it is automatically false so much as is unlikely to be true. It is the sort of extraordinary claim that would require extraordinary evidence - or at least some evidence.
Going to jump in here and join Malthus as a ‘grayer.’ From a society’s perspective, there are two key questions involved: when does person-hood begin, and how to fairly arbitrate a case between two persons with conflicting interests.
To the person-hood question, the ‘black-whiter’ views on both sides seem untenable and magical: fertilization clearly depends on a soul, and delivery grants person-hood not on some status of the fetus/baby, but on the actions of an outside actor, the mother.
In order to have clear law, a line in this field of gray must be drawn, and we are into classifier theory. Barring a break through in medical technology, the best dimension to draw this line is the one in current use - time since conception. Any line drawn will result in Type I and Type II errors. In this scenario, Type I error, false positive, means the rule called a fetus a person when it was not. Type II error, false negative, means the rule called a fetus not a person when it was.
Lifers go to great length to minimize Type II errors because the associated Type II cost (death of a person) greatly outweighs the Type I cost (woman’s body held hostage) in their perspective.
Choicers argue strongly for a Type I error cost. I have some trouble wrapping my mind around someone such as DianaG’s position, which comes across as ‘tough luck, kid, but up until you crown you’re fair game,’ but suspect it comes from a need to strongly pull the discussion point back from magical conception souls.
By keeping the discussion focused on defining person-hood at either of the limiting points for an abortion, black-whiters do not have to address the issue of what to do when there are two persons with conflicting interests. If we set a line for person-hood around the beginning of the third trimester (likely the minimum error rate point), we have the potential conflict of interests between:
a person (mother) who wants full use of her body
a person (fetus) who requires said body to survive
This is a very unique circumstance, hence all the twisted parallels, etc. We don’t have a common understanding of the ethics of conjoined twins, which is the closest circumstance I can come up with.
My base instinct is to defer to the side of survival - society should protect the defenseless. I do acknowledge that the choice side has a strong argument - a program of forced organ donation in other circumstances would be ghastly and unethical. The difference to me, is that this isn’t conscription of organs from an uninvolved stranger - the mother was an active agent* in the creation of the other person’s circumstances. An additional factor is that said organs are being partially borrowed for a period of only several months.
So, my ‘grayed’ thoughts: abortion is not an issue prior to the beginning of the third trimester. It should be widely available, subsidized even, to help eliminate the desire for abortion during the third trimester. During the third trimester, abortions should only be performed in cases of medical necessity. To me medical necessity is a condition that threatens the life of the mother, or in which the fetus is determined to be non-viable; the actual definition should be defined by a panel of professional experts.
*This brings up the question of pregnancies that are the result of rape or incest. In an ideal world, these would be eliminated by lowering barriers to abortion during the first and second trimesters. In a non-ideal world, this will not always be possible. It is a pair of bad choices, however, I would still err towards survival and keep the medical necessity only provision.
I’ve never agreed with that line of reasoning. Punishment in society isn’t given wild, “ironic” punishments; the man who steals food isn’t forcefed until he pukes, the rapist isn’t raped or castrated in return. Even if I agree that the mother as an active agent deserves some punishment, which I don’t, I wouldn’t say that her punishment is to bear the burden of pregnancy. If you want to punish her, jail her. What most pro-lifers are afraid to do is to advocate throwing the mother in jail. That’s one reason why I don’t buy their argument that abortion is murder because they do nothing to punish the mother who, at the very least, is not the murderer but the one hiring the hit man
Except that it still assumes qualities of a fetus that are in doubt. You want to have your cake and eat it too by saying its probably a person, but you can’t prove it so let’s just limit it after the third trimester. My view is that its not a person up until the point the cord is cut, so any wishy-washy compromise with people who want to go down the slippery slope isn’t going to get far with me. Abortion, to me, is not about killing a person but removing a growth in your body. It should be legal at any time
From my viewpoint, this has nothing to do with punishment in the criminal sense, but liability in the civil sense. We hold parents responsible for the well-being of their children post-birth. If we grant person-hood to children pre-birth, that same responsibility holds.
What magical nature of cutting the cord provides personhood? This seems like a definition made out of pure convenience, and I don’t find it very convincing. As a society we decide who belongs to the society and deserves it protections. I am arguing for a definition based on: human DNA and a certain level of brain function. To me this seems the least mystical approach, actually tied to what it is that makes us persons. It isn’t convenient to determine, hence the drawing of a time line.
Seems to me once you accept a factor as “magical”, it can’t exert any pull in the first place, hence there’s no need to pull the discussion away from it.
Personally, I’m okay with the woman’s right trumping any “soul” factor, simply because the practical results of the contrary are not an improvement.
I accept it as magical, the national discourse does not, which I think tends to push the counter argument to a more extreme position.
I think that an argument can be made for person-hood prebirth without relying on mysticism. A discussion without magic (souls at conception) or arbitrary happenstance (head popped out - congrats, you’re a person), is what I’m aiming for.