Sycorax: The problem resides in the fact that your intuition may in fact be correct with regards to whether your child will consent to not being born given the general circumstances of life here on earth. I make no bones about my desire for not ever having been born. My desire was not relevant to my mothers decision to have some child to entertain herself with; to give her a sense of meaning and purpose. While my situation is invariably troublesome, I do believe that aborting a child who desires to abuse people, is much more troubling, as they are grounded as being the only person actually desirous of life here. Once the opportunity presents itself to have or abort a fetus; the fact that your child could be immoral, renders that if your child is immoral, you have effectively destroyed the consent of a being with regards to it having wanted to be here to perpetrate brainwashing and other forms of gaming and abuse. I don’t see how any human being can argue against this being murder.
In the case of all other possible human entities, murder is not possible - in fact not being aborted is actually murder to two of them; the other is to incapacitated to get it either way. If it wasn’t for the possibility of a being potentially being immoral; I don’t think you would have a consent issue with regards to murder. As t would be impossible for any of your children to care that much about your sufferring with regards to bringing about their existence; however, not every child will be born this way.
That being the case, I think it is inarguable that abortion is murder, simply because a mother does not have the capacity to determine whether she bears a child which will become immoral.
If she mistakingly aborts a child who would become immoral, she has necessarily committed murder; or a termination of life against consent.
—Of course zygotes rarely, if ever, undergo elective abortions…so discussing their state of development is a bit of a red herring.—
I’m not saying that zygotes are fetuses.
However, plenty of people DO consider even birth control that stops implantation to be abortion, and indeed most of their arguments rest on exactly the same argument from potential, the very argument I’m taking a swipe at by using the zygote example, so it certainly seems to be a valid place to start.
However eager you or Lib might be to dismiss me at the earliest and most irrelevant juncture, I think I at least made a fair shot at eviscerating both the “it’s always a person” and the “but it’s a potential human” arguments, utterly regardless of whether I’m speaking about zygotes or fetuses, since the same arguments apply equally to zygotes. Raving atheist seems to have missed this, and I can’t blame him, getting blindsided by the “viability” argument, which I think Peter Singer pretty convincingly destroyed.
—In fact, it always scares me when science presumes to be the basis of philosophy rather than the other way around.—
Well, of course science cannot decide issues of value. But the idea that moral philosophy can function in a proscriptive way in the real world totally independant of confirmed facts about what’s going on is equally absurd. How can I know what the effects, or even the INTENTION of my act is if I don’t even know what I’m doing? If WHAT is being killed is of no philosophical interest to our concept of whether it is right or wrong to kill it, that is, if we can’t even discuss the criteria of beings which we think matter to our not being able to kill them, then we might as well be talking about ANY being, unidentified.
If it wasn’t for science, we never would have known that abortion pre-quickening was such a serious issue of moral philosophy to begin with. There’s something not quite fair about calling people on their use of descriptive criteria that they think are relevant to moral rights. How are you doing anything but the same? Is it wrong to kill rocks (since we can’t even decide that being “alive” is an important criteria)?
— I go to my doctor and find out I’m pregnant. It’s between him and me. Period.—
I go home to my wife and find out she hasn’t done the dishes. Whether to beat her or not is between her and me, period. Right?
No. Irrelevant. If people really believe that a fetus has the same moral stature as a conventional human being, and it is possible that you will seek to kill it, then they have every reason to want to find out about this crime and prevent/stop it, regardless of whether it happens behind closed doors or not, regardless of whether it belongs to you or not.
[QUOTE]
*Originally posted by Sycorax *
**I’m a woman and what is relevant is: who here has the right to participate with me and my doctor in a decision about my body. Why does everyone (pro-life and pro-choice) make this so complicated? It’s so easy for so many people (especially men, I’ve noticed)to philosophize about morality, hypothetical situations, when is a fetus a person, etc., etc. I go to my doctor and find out I’m pregnant. It’s between him and me. Period. You aren’t sitting in the doctor’s office with me, you don’t know my circumstances, and you don’t even know I’m pregnant. I have a right to privacy, just as all of you do. Before you can even weigh in with an opinion, I have to tell you I’m pregnant and that I plan to have an abortion. The fetus/baby is a part of my body. What I do with my body is MY business. What, if anything, is done about the pregnancy is between me and my doctor. If the baby is delivered and living apart from my body, then and only then does it become anyone else’s business.
You’re kidding…right? The line of thinking that you outlined above is the (or at least one of “the”) classic pro choice positions.
If the fetus is a living human being, then it’s everybody’s business.
I happen to agree. That’s why all this talk about “privacy” is irrelevant. No mother should have the right to kill her own child, simply because it is done in private.
—The fetus may be physically connected to the mother, but this does not make the fetus part of the mother’s body.—
I’d lay out the standard case of the dying violinist as a further support for this point, but I fear it would involve hypotheticals, extrapolation, and maybe even some discussion of facts.
Apos - so my body is not my own? Let’s see, how do you propose we “find out” about this so-called crime (note: the Supreme Court says it is not a crime). If I go to my doctor and say I think I’m pregnant, he has to call the pregnancy police to report it, and provide details about my care and, if I mention the word “abortion,” he reports me and I go to jail, where I give birth…and then what? Hmmm…gets a bit complicated - you figure it out and tell the legislators how this would work.
beagledave - oh, okay, I’m pro-choice.I just don’t like the term because I don’t believe it should even be debatable and come down to one side or the other. (And many equate “pro-choice” with “pro-abortion.”) What I meant was it wouldn’t be that easy for me to decide what to do. Sorry.
JThunder - you deliberately misunderstand my meaning. By “private,” I mean anyone and everyone has the right to go to one’s doctor (medical, pyschiatric, etc., etc.) and expect that no one else will know what transpired there. I have a right to do with my body what I want, just as you do. If I kill my one-week old infant “in private,” I have committed murder. Physically connected but not a part of my body? Excuse me? The fetus/baby depends on my body for survival. It gets its nourishment from my blood and can be harmed by what I put into my body, just as my heart can. That makes it a part of my body.
Depends on what transpires there. A psychiatrist is legally required to violate the patient-doctor trust if he/she feels reasonably certain that his/her patient is going to harm himself/herself or others.
You’ve got to be kidding me, eliminating unwanted tissue from one’s own body is akin to wife beating? :rolleyes:
What I “really believe” that a soccer ball has the same “moral stature as a conventional human being?” Does that mean I suddenly have the right to investigate everyone who I believe may be mistreating soccer balls. I’, sorry, dude but what you “really believe” grants you no legal rights whatsoever in regards to other people’s private lives.
BTW, just to put some of these issues to rest, a fetus is neither a “person,” nor a “human,” nor a “child” nor any other fiction that pro-lifers want to hypothesize, fantsize or fabricate. It is nothing, and has no rights and that’s the end of it.
“Potential” means nothing. It is fallacious to suggest that it does. A sperm is “potentially” a zygote, is it not? Then does that mean masturbation is murder? (if it does, than I’m worse than Pol Pot )
Do any of you anti-choice misogynists actually believe that it is YOUR personal business how my wife chooses to deal with a pregnancy? I don’t even think that it’s MY place to dictate that final decision.
Why, because you SAY so? If something is inside of another person’s body, and was created by that person’s body and is sustained by that person’s body, then it is PART of that person’s body. You can hold whatever philosophical views you want on the issue, but that is all they are, personal, bullshit philosophical OPINIONS. That is all they will EVER be, and no other person has any obligation to CONFORM to your beliefs.
The zygote is the beginning of the human life cycle. It’s the beginning of the life cycle for every species that reproduces through meiosis.
A sperm is the same as pretty much every other cell in the body, the only difference being that it’s haploid rather than diploid. However, it consists entirely of your own DNA. A zygote is different than every other cell in the body because it has significantly different DNA than every other cell in the body, since half of it comes from another source entirely. The two cell types are not analogous.
Surely even an anti-life baby-hater like you can see that ad hominems don’t assist the debate at all.
What a gutless response to my question. I’ll ask again:
Is it YOUR personal business what my wife does with her body?
This is a distinction without a difference. I was talking about the irrelevancy of “potential.” A sperm is potentially PART of a zygote. If you kill the sperm then that SPECIFIC “potential” zygote will never exist, therefore you have killed a zygote, therefore you have killed a person. Potential means nothing. Potential is a pure hypothetical, it has no tangible reality. A “potential” baby is still not a baby, so the best thing to do in the case of an unwanted pregnancy is to terminate it before that potential becomes a reality.
It’s an important distinction – a zygote is the beginning of the human life cycle, a sperm is just another cell in the human body (albeit one that happens to be haploid rather than diploid). See beagledave’s link, specifically Myth 3.
I agree that potential is irrelevant, but I disagree that a zygote is only a “potential” human being.
First of all, beagledave’s link is nothing but opinion and proves nothing. The human lifecycle begins at BIRTH and not before. A zygote is not a human being no matter how many times you say it is. The Supreme Court agrees with me. Ascribing personhood to a couple of cells is nothing but pure religious fantasy.
We know for a fact that a pregnant woman is a person. Some people like to believe that a zygote or a fetus is a person. The rights of the entity we know to be a person must always supercede the rights of an entity which we don’t know to be a person, regardless of the beliefs of opther parties, especially when those parties have no relationship or legal standing in regards to the woman.
If you don’t like abortion, don’t get one, nobody cares, but what other people do is none of your business.
Why would a human zygote be “not-a-human” when the zygote of any other animal that reproduces through meiosis is considered to be a separate entity from its parents (i.e. a new member of the species)? Unless, of course, you think that a chicken zygote (for example) is still part of its mother (despite being independent of its mother), or is the member of some mysterious non-chicken species (the “egg” species?) until it hatches…
I’m not ascribing personhood to anything – if you’d cared enough to have actually read the thread up until this point, you’d see that I’m in favor of abortion until the third trimester (at which point the fetus exhibits brain activity) because of the “personhood” argument. All I’m stating is a simple biological fact: a human zygote is a human being – the zygote of any species is the beginning of the life cycle of that species.
Prove that a fetus is not a human. If you cannot, then explain why one human entity (the pregnant woman, or a newborn) is a person, while another human entity (the fetus) is not.
Prove that a newborn is a person. If you cannot, then explain why a mother ought not to be allowed to kill her newborn.
For pity’s sake. I don’t like murder either, and I’m not planning on committing murder. Would you also like me to mind my own business if I see somebody trying to commit a murder? Or a theft? Or a rape?
I don’t have to prove a zygote isn’t a person, any more than I have to provew a soccer ball isn’t a person. If you want to confer the rights of personhood on something, then it is up to to you to prove it IS a person.
A newborn is a person because it has been BORN. Very simple.
Abortion is completely unanalogous to murder in two significant ways;
1.) It does not involve a victim.
2.) It happens to be LEGAL!!
How is another person’s private, legal activity any of your concern?
