** But then, I don’t think slavery is a good comparison to abortion.**
I think it is. Slaves weren’t legally considered people in the days of slavery, just as the unborn aren’t considered people.
People did with slaves as they wanted, just as people today do with the unborn what they want. Kill a slave? That was no big deal. Kill your unborn baby? That’s pretty much ok with us too, these days, with a few exceptions.
I don’t think that will ever happen.
Define “human”
Get a consensus on that definition
The element at issue here isn’t exactly the type who takes what science says seriously (unless it happens to support them). They will just say that it has a soul at conception.
Well, I think that these kind of heated subjects can be resolved once and for all. Actually, I think that the comparisons the OP put forward are quite valid, you’re just forgetting about the time span. Slavery was around for a very long time before it became abolished. Segregation was based on some of the same viewpoints that allowed slavery. Voting rights for women became an issue with industrialization, a fairly new concept in human evolution, yet industrialization had been changing the world for over a century before women were granted the right to vote.
Abortions on the other hand haven’t been around for long, at least not in the professional-medical-assembly-line setting. Give it a generation or two.
As a comparison, unrestricted abortions (first trimester) were allowed in Norway in 1977 (?). Before that women had to apply to get an abortion, and they had to appear before a board (often male-dominated) to make their case. At the time there were many heated discussions. Today abortions isn’t on the political agenda at all (nor in the news), even though there’s a small Christian Party which are holding crucial votes in the Parliament.
On a related note, same-sex sex acts were illegal until 1972, and it remained taboo until the 1980s. In 1991 (?) gays were granted the right to enter into official partnerships, giving them the same rights as married people, except the right to adopt. Today gay rights is much less of a topic than it used to be, and it’s declining by every year. You just now something has changed radically when a key Secretary is openly gay and is inviting the press into the home of him and his partner - and nobody makes a fuzz about it.
I contribute this to cultural evolution. In short: When we reach critical mass, we humans change, and when we change we change fast.
You kidding? Abortions have been around forever, in some societies used as population control. It is the professional-medical-assemly-line setting that hasn’t been around for very long.
You can’t unequivocally now or ever firmly establish a point when an embryo or fetus becomes human because development is continuous, unless you pick one of the two discontinuous endpoints (conception and birth).
I am not suggesting that either conception or birth is a reasonable definition of becoming human (and I don’t believe that either one is sensible), only that you will never get everyone agreeing on the same fixed point in between the two endpoints. As a result, the argument will never end.
No I’m not kidding, but I’m ready to be lectured. I wasn’t aware that there has been societies who used abortions as a population control tool.
However, I see your point. An argument can be made that prostitution is the world’s oldest profession, yet it’s still not allowed many places. But that could be a hijack.
When people can decide at what moment cletus the fetus becomes a human, many pesky issues will be resolved. One only has to note the EU decision , compared to the recent walking in the womb reports. If you look up the new 4D scans on google, many right wing (extremist) groups claim this is irrefutable (if anything ever actually could be that) evidence of the humanity. Many people would refuse the science that shows a lack of normal “humanness” the same as many ignore round earths, etc.
I personally wouldn’t get one (pesky Y chromosome again), but a personal friend had to make an extremely personal decision (med school or baby). I supported her completely, and it made me reassess preconceived notions of abortion. I had always assumed it was people who were just opting out of something. Perhaps if all people who were vehemently against it would have to have personal experiences, they would make better (or at least more rational and logical) decisions.
Yes, there are records of natural plants that caused abortions during the middle ages that I read about in World History. Even horses cause abortions in themselves, I have read about that too. It’s not even a completely human thing.
Fair enough, sorry for being snippy. Most recent cite I can throw at you is Dr. Diamond’s reference to it in Guns, Germs, and Steel being used by Polynesian islanders to control population in dense areas filled to carrying capacity (other methods they used were castration of some baby males). There is also historical record of abortions happening across the world - it isn’t a new practice by any means, though the safety of modern abortions is. Abortions historically have been very risky operations.
After a quick search, I can offer you this, Eurocentric though it may be:
“Abortion induced by herbs or manipulation was used as a form of birth control in ancient Egypt, Greece, and Rome and probably earlier.”
http://www.encyclopedia.com/html/section/abortion_HistoryofAbortion.asp
Doing some quick googling myself, it turns out you were right, at least to the extent that abortion was in fact both organized and a debated topic earlier than I thought.
According to this timeline, the first birth control clinic opened in Holland in 1882.
My search also turned up Abortion in Law, History and Religion, an extensive guide to the history of abortion in most countries worldwide. Quite impressive.
Depends on what you were counting them for.
And we can make a comparison to how people treat vegetables, too. And they’re all alive. And they all have the letter ‘e’ in them. A point which quite obviously distinguishes slaves from fetuses are their development as homo sapiens sapiens. I appreciate that you might not consider this distinction important. If you do not, perhaps something like a slavery analogy actually makes sense. But I do, and it doesn’t. Suggesting they are analogous is begging the question as your point of comparison is that fetuses and slaves are people when, to some, they aren’t.
I don’t think we are entirely living in the solution, but I think this is where we need to be. Who cares if it’s against someone’s religious beliefs if I have an abortion? I’m not making them have one, am I? We need to start minding our own business more often.
How people get this idea that they know what’s better for others I will never understand.
I think you don’t understand the crucial point of disagreement between the two sides. To someone who believes that the fetus is a person, your having an abortion is just as bad as your killing your five year old child. Now, you’re not arguing that society should just mind its own business and not prosecute that lady in Houston who killed her three kids last year, right?
That’s not (necessarily) true. I’m prochoice (far beyond the current scope of the law), but I’m not one of the “Sneeze” people. The fetus (and the embryo, for that matter, and yea, even the blastocyte that gave rise to it) is certainly human. It is certainly alive. It doesn’t get to vote (but neither does your hypothetical five year old child). It doesn’t ingest food and digest it and obtain nutrients, nor does it breathe, which your hypothetical five year old child does do – does that make it a nonperson? It doesn’t have memories, beliefs, intentions, or an investment in the projects and goals and accomlishments of life, which your five-year old does have – does that make it a nonperson?
The important part is that it doesn’t exist as an independent body that the bodies, and therefore the lives, of any other specific human beings can be disentangled from. The mom or dad or custodial second cousin in charge of your hypothetical five year old can give the kid up for adoption, can even, in a crisis, call the police or hospital and explain that there’s just no way in hell they can tolerate the little monster one moment more, and hand it over and relinquish parental authority and responsibility.
The embryo (*see rant below), fetus, or blastocyte, in contrast, is part of the body of another person, physically intertwined with her, whether it’s also a person or not.
And it’s not the right to demand that it be dead that motivates most of us prochoice folks — it’s the right to say “I don’t want this thing growing in me, get it out, NOW”.
You want to say “but that’s killing a person”, fine, but it’s just semantics. “Person” is a construct of language and law. We authorize our armed forces to kill people under circumstances we decide makes it necessary, including, at times, collateral damage in the form of civilian deaths, a category which, in turn, often includes some of those five-year-olds. (And fetuses, embryos, and blastocytes, along with the pregnant gals inside of whom they were growing). We may not like it that this happens, but we accept that there do exist situations in which we find that necessary.
Now, don’t even think of trying to say I’m equating the necessity of killing enemies in a war who might otherwise be killing us with the necessity of killing of fetuses, embryos, and blastocytes :mad: I’m not — I’m simply establishing that calling them “people” doesn’t automatically lead to “you must not kill them”.
Now, if you want to go on and say “Sometimes it is OK to kill people but being pregnant when you don’t want to be isn’t one of those times”, go ahead and take that position. (My preemptive retort is that I think only the pregnant person is in the right position to make that assessment and therefore we should leave it up to her.)
But c’mon, quit already with the tired, wrong, strawman line that “If we could only establish when they become people we could quickly decide whether or not abortion is OK”.
Odd that you should compare abortion and slavery. I think that prohibiting a woman from having an abortion is a form of slavery. In a regime that banned the practice, a woman has no choice but to submit to nine months of forced blood and tissue donations.
Well, for the sake of argument, let’s assume that pregnancy is a form of slavery. (I contest this strongly, since it is the mother who helped create the helpless fetus and holds it captive, but for the sake of argument, let’s grant your analogy.)
Would the black slaves have been justified in killing the slaveowners in order to achieve their freedom? If your analogy is apt, and pregnant women are indeed enslaved by the unborn fetuses, then abortion is acceptable only if the killing of slaveowners is likewise a morally acceptable choice.
It’s interesting how pro-choicers continually make this out to be a religious issue. **Bob Cos/stratocaster[/b, beagledave and I have been arguing against abortion here for years now, and we have consistently appealed to science, philosopy and legal precedents in our debates. I do not recall even a single instance in which we appealed to religious beliefs.
Heck, former NARAL founder Bernard Nathanson is well-known for switching to the pro-life camp due to scientific evidence, while he was still an atheist. In other words, religious beliefs had nothing to do with it. (He did later convert to Catholicism, but not until many years after his political conversion.)
Similarly, prominent pro-life authors such as Dr. Francis Beckwith, Randy Alcorn and George Grant consistently use non-religious arguments in contending against abortion, as do debaters such as Scott Klusendorf, who is perhaps the foremost [url=“http://www.wcr.ab.ca/news/2000/1113/prolifer111300.shtml”]pro-life debater in the USA.
Of course, it’s much easier to insist that this is merely a religious issue. After all, why use the facts, when mudslinging is so much more convenient?
The manipulative language of the anti abortion crew when they renamed themselves as PRO LIFE is such crap. PRO CONTROL is more like it.
The only other time I have heard ANYTHING that the ‘pro life’ crew has done that hasn’t concerned abortion is in trying to remove assisted suicide laws.
So, by their ‘thinking’, you can’t control your life or your death unless you go to war. Why do we not hear the PRO LIFE contingent speaking out against the senseless deaths created by an illegal war?
What… are you only ‘pro life’ when it is removing the free will from others to conform to your way of thinking?
You are not fighting on the side of truth, virtue, and right. The ‘Pro Life’ movement is inherently immoral crusaders to spread conformity and destroy choices.
Foolproof birth control? 
Those of you old enough to remember when abortion was illegal in all states know that it still happened, so even banning it again isn’t going to stop it. Not to mention that women will be able to go to Canada. Or are the pro-lifers going to throw women in jail for doing something perfectly legal where they did it?
I’d believe that transplanting fetuses was a solution if our orphanages were empty. You think there is going to be a lot of call for fetuses with genetic problems? Fetuses of color?
And I agree that birth control would be a good solution - but it seems many of those opposed to abortion are also anti-birth control. If half the energy devoted to screaming at abortion clinics were devoted to educating young women and men about birth control, the abortion rate would drop drastically. This would be good, I hope we all agree - a surgical procedure is almost always not as good as a pill or a piece of rubber.
That isn’t even remotely true, is it? After all, if a person believe that life begins at conception, they would be ‘inherently immoral crusaders’ only if they did nothing to protect that life. Speaking out for unborn children (again, for people who believe that life begins at conception) is the logically consistant thing to do.