That’s not a substantive response. buttonjockey308 said that an innocent life must be able to support itself in order to merit protection. I pointed out that newborns and the severely disabled are incapable of supporting themselves, as are most children. So the logical conclusion to draw is…?
You can pretend that this is a strawman argument, if you wish. That seems like a convenient means of avoiding the logical implications of buttonjockey308’s claim, though.
Oh give me a break. I am sorry I didn’t take the time in a post already restating things I’ve said to say them as complexly as I had previously so I can repeat myself for the next five pages. I am surely aware you find it deeply and fundamentally wrong. My point is that I don’t care why you want the ban if we are talking about a ban. If we are talking about a ban I want to know how it will be done. Once that is covered, we can then ask you the question: “Has this ban achieved what you had hoped?” We can also ask: “What more can we do to make this ban work?” That is to say, we can ask the practical questions.
Like some of us have been.
Let’s hear it, then. We are fairly smart people here. I daresay many of us are intelligent enough and have the requisite special knowledge to hear the logic that can be used to determine that a fetus deserves more protection than a skin cell or tumor.
JT: A skin cell is human life. (It’s from a human, and it’s alive). A skin cell is not an autonomous human individual. What differentiates a skin cell from a fertilized egg? What differentiates a cancer cell from a fertilized egg? They’re all human life. So is the clump of cells writing this post. Not all of them are deserving of legal or moral protection.
Hey, I don’t care if your hatred of abortion burns with the white-hot intensity of a billion suns; I would never blindly accept your emotions, or anyone else’s emotions, as the basis for forming law.
None of those crimes are relevant to abortion, but in all those cases there is a clearly human victim. I don’t put a fetus in the same category as a rape/abuse/torture victim, and your attempts to straw-man me are ridiculous.
Okay, I wish to disgree, and I’ll repeat that while scientific evidence (and even emotion, to some degree) is useful for the debating of law, scientific evidence is not law.
And as I’ve stated repeatedly, even if I was to concede that a fetus is scientifically the equivalent of human being, and even if I thought it was the legal equivelant of a human being, I would still support the woman’s right to make the key decision.
There are times when the rights of one human can override the rights of another. Even if a fetus was considered human, I’d consider abortion to be one of these times, and I’d let the woman make the call. I take this stance because I find denying the woman’s right to make that call is more odious than abortion itself.
Now you’re changing the topic. I was specifically addressing your statement that
As I pointed out, that is NOT what pro-lifers are saying. Since your claim has been disproven, you have shifted gears and are now saying “I don’t care why you want the ban… I want to know how it will be done.” An all-too-common tactic, when one’s unfounded claims have been exposed.
Funny, it sure looks like that’s what you’ve been saying.
I don’t think hairspltting or appeal to authority constitute a proof, myself, but it seems to be all the ammunition you have, so you may as well keep using it.
So… how will it be done? Just curious.
Personally, I can’t see a good way to support the right of the woman to have an abortion without stomping all over the right of the fetus to live.
Also, how do you feel about second-trimester abortions, since children can now be delivered during the second trimester?
I think once a fetus achieves viability, an ethical doctor should advise the woman that she may as well see it through, simply because by that time, the fetus is large enough to make an abortion risker than seeing the child to term (assuming some medical problem with the pregnancy putting the mother at risk has not been determined).
Even then, if the woman really wants an abortion, I’m not comfortable denying it to her. I consider this more of a medical matter than a legal one, and if she wants the procedure and can find a doctor willing to perform it, so be it.
As for stomping all over the rights of the fetus… I don’t recognize that the fetus has any rights, and even if I did, the rights of the woman should, in my opinion, take priority.
I’m changing the topic?
Please at least pretend to understand that I know you consider it fundamentally wrong. I do not, and my comment about “not liking” was meant to marginalize the opinion.
I’m not backpedalling. I do not lack strength in my convictions. I am neither shifting gears. As far as I’m concerned you want it banned because you don’t like it. However, the main thrusts of most of my posts, barring the one where I responded to the site you linked to, has been to ask repeatedly how such a ban will be accomplished.
How a ban will work, of course, depends in no way on why or to what extent you feel there should be a ban. Hence its irrelevancy. Perhaps you feel your opinions, being yours, grant them automatic legitmacy and practicality for legal enforcement. I doubt you do, however, but I must leave the possibility open. It would certainly answer the hijack question of why you’ve avoided discussing practical matters.
I am trying to have an honest debate about the practicality of a ban: how will it work? How will it be enforced? How will we ensure that abortions are not performed? In order to do that I felt compelled to demonstrate that the depth and character of individual convictions about abortion are not a factor of the practicality of banning it. Specifically, a ban will not work just because you “deeply and fundamentally think abortion is wrong”. That is, your wishing doesn’t make it so. Neither do declarations and judgments about behavior.
In short, I am taking for granted that you do find abortion wrong in some degree that you feel a ban is justified. If you would like to argue some more about things we agree on, please feel free.
I’ve also read (wish I had a link, it was a while ago) a doctor who was talking about brain development in infants. Apparently, at birth your brain is all there but it’s not really fully turned-on or put-together yet - he said that this process usually occurred over the first 9 hours after birth, or something like that. He also believed that if a woman wanted to ‘abort’ post-birth, there would be no real difference between the newly born infant and the fetus it was a few hours before if it was done in the first few hours, and it should be allowed - possible reasons for infanticide could be a defect that was not apparent pre-birth, or maybe just change of heart.
Though I can see his point, I disagree with him that infanticide be legalized, even in cases of deformity, for reasons other than the definition of what is a ‘real’ human or not. After a child is born, even if his brain isn’t really turned on yet and his mother doesn’t want him, he still has some potential in the care of others (in the case of some birth defects, they are doomed to a painful death, which is why controlled infanticide does have some appeal to me), and our society already has the means to take responsibility for unwanted infants. Before it is born, even if it’s tapping out theses on the meaning of life in morse code on it’s mothers uterine walls, it’s right to live is overridden by the mother’s personal rights to do what she likes with her body, and there’s no way the state can say ‘Hey, if you don’t want to take care of that fetus, we’ll take it off your handsd and find it a nice womb to keep it in’. If medical technology does reach that point in the future (and I am fairly sure it will, though it may be after birth control is so reliable that there are no unwanted children), then I might seriously consider a ban on abortion.
The first paragraph was supposed to have more of a point, I went off track and forgot to make it.
There is a vast range of opinion in the medical profession when it comes to the beginning of life and at what points it is acceptable to end a life. You can’t just say ‘Doctors say a fetus is alive, it’s murder to kill them!’ and use that as the justification behind your entire argument, or at least you can’t without getting your argument picked apart. You are taking a medical definition and using it in a legal argument, and then when people point out that the legal definition of a human being differs from the medical profession’s, you claim that the medical definition trumps the legal definition, all along ignoring the fact that many doctors, including some of those who would say that a fetus is a living being, would argue that abortion is not murder.
Sheesh back to you, O Thunderous One
Actually, the question of whether any/a significant number of atheists are opposed to abortion isn’t exactly important to me, I was just questioning whether the Internet existence of organizations quoted actually meant anything other than ‘a couple of guys and a website’ and quoting yet another website hardly counts as evidence for anything other than there being a website.
As to positions that individuals take from time to time, that’s not impressive either, especially converts (either way).
Consider yourself now doubly-Sheeshed, O Thunderous One.
It little matters what your individual obsession is on this subject, I’m only interested in what is the outcome of your position. Of course, I realize that it suits you to frame your position in other terms than taking control of women’s bodies.
ButtonJockey
This, in my opinion is the difference, too, which you’d have noticed had you read this thread. I’m firmly pro-choice, I was just pointing out a flaw in your argument.
You seem to have missed my point, so I’ll try and rephrase it a bit more clearly. My point was that you are telling pro-lifers to ‘get over it and not have one’ if they disagreed with your opinion. This is as ridiculous as me telling you to ‘get over it and don’t do it’ in regards to your (probably) objection of 12 year old killings, if you equated 12 year olds with 12 week old fetuses. See what I mean ? You and I think the fact that it needs the mother is important, and therefore don’t equate them, but pro-lifers don’t. And as long as they see no difference between a 12 year old boy (which anyone can care for) and a 12 week old fetus (which only the current pregnant woman can care for), that argument makes no difference.
So my wife essentially weeded out 5 murderers out of our family through “natural selection”…should I throw a party? Your assumption is bizarre at best. If I follow your assumption, then what the hell were the collective moms of Charles Manson, Adolph Hitler and Saddam Hussien, (etc.) thinking when they “chose” to keep their fetuses?
My wife and I realized that each abortion (natural and not natural) was a human life that was terminated and not just a lump of cells. The real issue is whether a pregnant woman thinks - “Is that a human being that will be a member of my family growing inside of me, or is that just an inconvenient lump of cells that have the potential of changing my life for the worse?” Essentially, you’re trying to convince me that when we lost 5 “groupings of cells”, so you can make a point that abortion is not murder, is poor reasoning on your part. Life begins at conception, not before, not after. Women do have tough choices to make; I had to witness it first hand and comfort my wife after the decision was made, and also to comfort her after her body aborted the other 4 fetuses…hey, tell you what…I’ll tell her that we wasted months of tears on potential murderers, that should make things ok…shouldn’t it?
Seems like you lack perspective through real life experiences in this regard…
I’ve have read and heard of many women regretting years later of aborting their fetus(es), but I have yet to hear from mothers who regretted bearing their children and raising them (even mothers of murderers)…
There are people who believe that killing animals is just as bad as killing people, and the meat industry is guilty of murder. Should we start all debates on whether or not it’s OK to eat meat with the assumption that an animal life is equal to a humans, because a minority have personal beliefs that hold this true, and abandon any arguments that don’t make that assumption?
You aren’t going to convince someone that eats meat that it’s wrong because killing animals is murder, because that argument is based on a personal belief that is not shared with the meat-eater. You should instead try to find a common belief that can be used to support your stance. Many anti-meat people are able to do this, appeal to people who don’t believe an animal is equal to a human, but can agree with the other arguments against the meat industry. Most anti-choice people either can’t or won’t use any other argument other than ‘Fetuses are human beings and killing them is murder’.
I suppose you want some cites on regretting abortion.
The only thing that could ever make me seriously consider suidice would be a pregnancy I couldn’t end. Is that life threatening enough?
Another way of phrasing that is ‘They really have bad feelings about it.’ Yet another way is to say ‘They really don’t like it.’
There are people who believe that drinking alcohol is deeply and fundamentally wrong. That’s their personal belief to have a strong dislike of drinking. It doesn’t make them right, and it doesn’t necessarily mean they should get to impose their personal beliefs on someone else, because that’s all they are. Just beliefs, not facts. It’s what anti-choice people don’t like, and that’s their personal problem, not mine.
Adoption is not an alternative to pregnancy and birth, JThunder. Believe it or not there are many of us who would abort not only because we don’t want to be mothers, but because we don’t want to be pregnant and don’t want to ever go through labor. Adoption’s not an option for someone who, like me, never wants to be pregnant or go through labor.
Nope, actually we don’t. We don’t need any argument at all, because there’s no obligation whatsoever on us to justify our medical decisions to someone whose personal beliefs hold those procedures ‘deeply and fundamentally wrong’. If such an obligation existed, I’d have to justify myself to a Christian Scientist every time I took an anti-biotic.
That sounds to me a hell of a lot like ‘You aren’t important enough to have your rights matter.’ You can turn that around and say that I’m doing the same thing to fetuses if you want, but the reality is that out of me or a fetus, I’m the only one who will suffer emotional and mental distress at knowing that I am not valued by society.
Aside from that, the fetus is not a person. It’s human, but until it can breathe, eat and excrete, it is not a person and it has no rights. It certianly doesn’t enjoy any of the Constitutional rights that a citizen does until it is born or naturalized in the United States.
—I already cited medical authorities who adamantly attest that the fetus IS a human being. Not the mere equivalent of one, but an actual human being.—
First you claim you understand the irrelevancy of this sort of distinction, and now, when it suits your purposes, you’re back at it?
Thanks, Flight, for rephrasing. I get it now. 
I can see how from your point of view, my opinion looks like it’s ok to kill someone to alleviate a burden if there is no other way. That is not how I view it, though.
It’s not a case of a ‘burden’ that can be killed, IMO. It’s a case of not legally forcing someone to give, or donate the use of, their body against their wishes. In the case of abortion, yes the act results in the killing of a human being, but the act of denying the use of the uterus and the act of denying the use of bone marrow are the same in my eyes. Someone else may donate the bone marrow, but it can’t be forced or required, it is given. Until technology improves, nobody else can nurture the fetus beside the woman, but that is no reason to force her to, IMO.
IOW, what you call “killing a burden”, I call refusing aid. And I think it should be perfectly legal to refuse anyone aid. The world would be a better place IMO if nobody ever refused another in need, but that isn’t the case and it’s giving of yourself, not being forced to give that is the key. I think you see it from the aspect of the fetus, in that it is a burden, and so being killed by the mother who doesn’t want the burden. I see it from the perspective of a woman (who believe 100% that the fetus is a living human being) and think she has just as much right to refuse the use of her body by anyone (born or not) as a man does. Just because she has a uterus which can nourish a fetus, doesn’t mean she should be forced to do so anymore than the fact that she has blood in her veins is a reason to force her to donate it. It’s hers, to do with what she chooses.
I hope that explains my position a bit more fully, so I’m not accused of pro- “killing burdens”. It’s not about burdens, it’s about self-determination.