There are relatively few pro-life atheists; Nat Hentoff is one, but I think his slant is more of an anti-eugenics or anti-racism one rather than a respect for human life in general. As I have explained here , I find the religious left’s treatment of the issue to be repugnant. The religious right’s view is just as illogical, but at least it deals with the central issue: the personhood of the fetus.
So you believe the personhood of the fetus is the central issue? And you believe it is an issue seldom addressed or glossed over by the religious left? (cite? elaboration? example?)
In my experience, the issue of the personhood (or lack thereof) of the fetus is perennially trotted out and waved about in every abortion-rights debate I’ve stumbled across. Far from being an issue seldom given due attention, I think it’s been flogged for all its worth.
For me it most certainly is NOT the central issue, btw. The central issue is the woman’s right (or lack thereof) to kill something that is ALSO (whatever else it may be) part of her body that she does not wish to continue to host. I believe in that right, and the personhood of the fetus, while it makes her decision a weighty one, does not alter the fact that it is indeed her decision.
Oh, and welcome to the board. You are brave (and/or foolhardy) to make your initial post in Great Debates. If you have not lurked and watched for awhile, it may help for you to know the following:
a) assertions of fact, whether in setting up the framework for making your position assertions or in direct support of their underlying reasoning, will generally require a cited reference unless they are “everyday knowledge”. And around here maybe even then.
b) in GD, the more clearly you can lay out what it is that you are asserting to be “how it is” (and therefore what it is that you wish to debate), the better.
Oh, incidentally, in case it is germane to the discussion, I am neither an atheist nor a “subscriber” to any organized / institutionalized religion.
I thought from the title of this thread (first part at least) that the subject was all the fetuses that naturally abort, often without the mother even ever knowing she was pregnant. Hence, God performing abortions.
Welcome to the SDMB TRA, by the way.
Yes, personhood is the central, and threshold issue. As explained in the link provided in my original post, the issue of the woman’s right isn’t even relevant until you’ve determined the status of the fetus. As to the religious left’s disregard of this issue, it is also fully documented (with hyperlinks to religious left pro-abortion websites) in the original link. Ironically, even the atheist sites turn to religious left theology to support their pro-abortion position (before you accuse me of not documenting this statement, please again see the link, by clicking on the word “here” in the original post).
AHUNTER: I provided a link setting forth my sources. I could repeat those here, if that is the preference. However, I would also suggest that the offense allegedly taken at the lack of cited references has nothing to do with the lack of documentation (which was provided) but with the disagreement with the position.
Is the only purpose of this thread to link to your personal website, TRA? Because both of your posts so far seem to amount to, “Go look at my website.”
Why can’t you sum up your position for us here? Why must we all go to your website to read something you’ve already said there? This is a forum for Debate, not for Required Reading.
Debate means “Talk to us”, not “tell us to go read your web page.”
I just want to take issue with this statement, Raving:
“As explained in the link provided in my original post, the issue of the woman’s right isn’t even relevant until you’ve determined the status of the fetus”
Why isn’t it relevant? Why is the status of the fetus more important? Are you making this statement from your opinion, or are you asserting it should be everyone elses?
Kwestion: Assume a person is on a special kind of life support, where they need constant blood transfusions to live. If you don’t give blood to a person, then is it murder?
The personhood is an issue, but not the sole one.
Meatros: I didn’t say the woman’s right isn’t relevant AT ALL, I said it wasn’t relevant UNTIL you’ve determined the status of the fetus. If the fetus is no more than a wart or a tumor, obviously no one would dispute the woman’s right to remove it. The relevance of the woman’s right arises when (and only if) you determine that there is a competing right. And I never said that the right of a fetus was more important; I believe that the woman’s right is superior in ALL cases where her health or life is seriously threatened.
The question I am addressing is elective abortion in the earlier stages. I’m not aware of anyone, at either end of the political spectrum, who believes that a woman may abort a seven or eight month old fetus just because she doesn’t want to have a child. That’s not even a remotely debatable issue.
Well said; the relevance arises.
Welcome to the boards.
I believe women have the unalienable and universal right to terminate any pregnancy at any time that they find it necessary to do so.
Seven, eight, or nine months.
So you have now.
And of course it is debateable.
Upon what do you base this belief?
I don’t think personhood is the issue precisely because that debate is a game of semantics, not substance. It avoids the true central issue, the moral status of the fetus, by appealing to the extension or retraction of categories like human or person. But it is not these categories that have moral status: it is the beings they describe. So whether the fetus is human or not, whether it is a person or not, is beside the point. The fetus is a different sort of being than those for which we have a solid case and agreement on moral concerns, regardless of whether it falls in or out of different definitions of those categories. You still have to have a case for the fetus, specifically, that can stand on its own no matter what choice terminology is used: a case based on concepts, not the definitions used to describe them. You can’t just say “it’s a person (under this perfectly legitimate definition) therefore it’s of moral concern.”
My own take is that at most stages, a fetus IS of some moral concern, but only as much as one would accord the interests of other beings with similar capacities at whatever stage of development it is at.
To my mind, the whole issue of personhood is essentially a red herring. It exists merely to ensure that pro-choice arguments run with a minimum of conflagration. Pro-life seeks to protect human lives, the qualification ‘person’ is an unnecessary hindrance.
Yes, this is correct but you can reach this conclusion without dabbling in the fallacy of ‘personhood’. The simple fact that the fetus is a human life is enough. The qualification ‘person’ is used by pro-choicers to differentiate betwene what has been born and endowed with legal rights and what hasn’t. Since pro-lifers protect fetuses, the whole concept is irrelevant.
Say again?
** I **
For any loosely & generally described pregnancy, at any stage of the game prior to birth, I can come up with some unanticipated specifics that would cause at least some people to say that an abortion under those circumstances is a reasonable and moral choice, whether you yourself, the OP, or Randall Terry would be among them or not.
So who should make such a decision, given that it isn’t a foregone moral conclusion? I believe the pregnant person, she and she alone, is in the logical position to do so, assuming that she is competent to make decisions in general. If she merely did not wish to have the baby, she presumably would have had the abortion long before this*, so presumably something in her situation has changed to cause her to seek an abortion only at this late stage. There is no one else on the planet who can be said to have more at stake here than she does who is in a position to make an argument. If you could read her mind and know her situation in intimate and excruciating detail, perhaps you could say that in this or that specific case her decision to abort is an immoral one. But you can’t. The only realistic hypothetical “you” that could be making this decision other than the pregnant person herself is the state, either in the form of an applicable law that was written beforehand or in the form of a designated person making the decision instead of her based on whatever information he or she can acquire.
So, Allan at his most libertarian says the State is not the way to go here. Let the individual pregnant person make the call. She, more than anyone else, has to live with the consequences.
- assuming that access to abortion was unimpeded earlier in her pregnancy, as it should be.
II
From a more distant vantage point, this way of doing things fits my desire to see the best good and least harm, morally speaking, for everyone. Whenever it is not true that women can terminate a pregnancy if they see fit to do so, it follows that sexuality is riskier for women than when they possess unimpeded control over their reproductive processes. I regard the world that has resulted from the sexual double standard (which in turn results from forcing pregnant women to remain pregnant involuntarily) to be a grossly immoral one, and the world of greater sexual equality and lessened double standard to be substantially better – less adversarial between the sexes and potentially ever more so as old attitudes and conventions die a little more every decade.
More than a few of the anti-abortion Right to Life leaders have identified the same correlation but they are on record as having the opposite moral preference, i.e., that they wish a return to the heyday of the double standard.
Like all things in the law, “it depends.” Under the implied fact scenario you’ve set out here, though, it probably is. The fact that the person has been placed on life support indicates that somebody (his family, a hospital) has undertaken a legal duty to care for this person. An abandonment of this individual would, at the least, probably lead to a finding of criminally negligent homicide. (Compare it to, say, a parent who drops a young child in the woods to fend for herself.)
**I don’t follow your logic. I can come up with some unanticipated specifics that would cause at least some people to say that genocide is a reasonable and moral choice. This is not a moral premise, by itself. Since everything else you argue in point I proceeds from this premise, perhaps you can clarify.
**Does sexual equality trump all other moral issues? Is it possible that sexual equality can be immensely important and still be “lesser” than another consideration, in a given circumstance?
Just my 2 cents worth. I find it very idiotic (for lack of a better term) that the value of the life of the unborn baby (I won’t call him or her a fetus so as to dehumanize), depends on the whim of the mother; whether or not she happens to want it.
It’s tragic to me that doctors will work to save an unborn baby at any age because the mother wants him or her and at the same time killing other unborn babies just because the mother says so. Can’t a pregnant woman go to court and sue if someone causes her to lose an unborn baby? If that unborn baby’s life is important and considered valuable then every unborn baby’s life is valuable and should be protected.
And the atrocity of partial birth abortion, in my view, is nothing more than legalized murder; not that I don’t think all abortion is murder. Why should the right of an unborn human being to live be decided at the whim of the mother? I believe life begins at conception and is sacred. The so called rights of the mother end when they run into the life of another human being.
There are cases for abortion, such as when the mother’s life is in danger but killing babies at any stage of pregnancy just because the mother says so is wrong in my opinion and should be illegal. You’re killing a baby, people, not a fetus.