God the Abortionist: A pro-life atheist's view

[beagledave]

*Originally posted by Diogenes the Cynic *
**I haven’t been playing your little semantic game about “human” vs “person” because it is irrelevant. You are welcome to believe that a cluster of cells is a “human being” if that pleases you. I will think of it as a human zygote which is clearly and demonstrably different than a fully formed person.
**

Strawman. No pro life person thinks that a zygote/embryo/fetus is not demostrably different in appearance and development from a “fully formed person” …ALTHOUGH…what is a fully formed person? The brain is not fully developed until the teen years…
**

The legal definition is that a fetus becomes human when it leaves the birth canal.
**

There is not such legal definition. You’re blowing smoke. I challenge you to provide a legal cite for the claim that “a fetus becomes human when it leaves the ebirth canal”

**

(and your “cites” represent nothing more than the shrill and specious assertions of other anti-choicers)
**

Holy crap. Did you actually READ the cites? Do you know for a fact that they are “other anti-choicers”. I provided several cites from medical sources about the nature of the being created at conception…you provided how many medical cites? Oh yeah… none. Still. I issue the challenge again…I suspect you’ll punt again, :rolleyes:

**
So what? Does it have the same rights as a real person? When does it acquire these rights? At the moment of fertilization? Implantation? Second trimester? Third? At what specific MOMENT does abortion become murder. Who decides. Do we set a deadline? Do we set a specific TIME? (e.g. you cannot get an abortion after twelve o’clock of day 60). If a woman gets an abortion one minute before the deadline, is it NOT murder?

**

Well didn’t the Supremes set one timeline? I guess that the answer about who gets “rights” belongs essentially to the electorate and their reps. At one time, blacks didn’t enjoy the rights “of a real person” either. Through public discourse, debate and political action…rights can be extended and changed over time.

[Diogenes_the_Cynic]

Well, you’re all still avoiding the REAL questions here. (you don’t like the CAPS, Ben? I really DON"T CARE)

1.) Do you belive it is YOUR personal business what my wife does with her body?

2.) What SHOULD the law be? I want details. Would you make ALL abortions illegal? What exceptions would there be? What would be the punishment? Who would be punished?

I would actually like to hear some answers to these questions, because they are the only ones that are meaningful. All of the grandstanding, specious assertions about nitpicking biological semantics really prove nothing.

Answer the questions that matter.

[Tee]

I don’t think I qualify as one of the ‘religious left’, being a non-practicing Catholic…‘left’ doesn’t describe me very well either…thought I’d put my two cents in anyway.

Being a woman, having had two children of my own, I’m able to see the logistical improbability of being able to assign two persons inherent rights within the same human body. More often than not the two sets of rights compliment each other - the right to be born and the right of control, to give birth or not. Sometimes they don’t.

Just by saying that much I’m assigning ‘rights’ left and right (pun?) which may or may not exist. Those would be based on my personal beliefs.

I’ve not seen a pro-life argument that addresses the issue of why the interests of one (unborn) human supercedes those of the other one, within the same life. No, we cannot decide to kill someone else just because feel like it, but the law concerns two individuals…people who might have been conceived through a contraceptive barrier and who pass through the uterus without attaching to the mother, and die, are still largely unnoticed. If a pregnancy fails naturally for whatever reason, it ‘wasn’t meant to be’. A stillborn baby, ‘those things happen.’ An unborn child is still a part of ‘one life’, there is no life without the mother; in fact, there is simply no guarantee of life at all until a successful birth.

I take a moderate position on abortion rights (I hear, ‘there is no such thing’…well there is) which means at the time of conception til somewhere before the second trimester it isn’t viable, it’s not a ‘being’ yet, not an individual. (I felt this way about my own - I wasn’t ‘hosting’ anyone, I had a physical condition.) After that, viability becomes an issue with me. Sure that’s a subjective, unsubstantiated call on my part, but it may be shared by the majority in society. Access to abortions are more restricted than one would think; laws are on the books in every state I think. Most third-trimester abortions are those with special considerations, like Trisomy18 or vital defects. Someone who was having a third-trimester abortion ‘just because I changed my mind’ might find it illegal, or may just not find a doctor to perform it. Doctors have personal beliefs, too.

The most alarming thing about the pro-lifers, to me, is that the arguments extend to birth control. Logically they would have to extend to the morning-after pill (definitely) and other forms of contraception that prevent a fertilized egg from implanting. There’s no guarantee there’s one in there, and no one including the mother will ever know, but there could be, and that of course would mean causing the death of a future human. I’ve met people who agree with that, and frankly I’d rather not see them gaining too much control.

So Pro-choice works for me. Sounds corny but I exercised that choice twice over, so can every other pregnant person. JMO. (long, sorry.)

[Ben_Hicks]

Diogenes.

I’ll tackle question 1. I’ll leave question 2 for someone with a legislative background.

Do you belive it is YOUR personal business what my wife does with her body?

I did actually address this question in my first post. I will repeat my answer.

“As to your question. Rather loaded, no? It assumes from the get go that the unborn isn’t fully human. If the unborn is fully human then it is everyone’s business.”

Everyone includes me but is not specifically limited to me. If your wife had an abortion in a society where abortion was illegal then the facts of her crime would be public domain, same as if I killed my first born. If I asked you “Do you belive it is YOUR personal business whether or not I abuse my children?” what would you reply? Your answer to that question will most likely be the same as my answer to your question. Clear?

In the meantime, I asked you quite a lot of questions in my post. Care to tackle those?

[Essured]

Wow !

I’ve been following this debate and I had to jump in at this point and say two things.

1. Welcome to the SDMB, Hicks. I can’t wait to see more from you.

2. I’m strongly pro-choice and I agreed with almost every word you said in your initial post. Bravo.

[Ben_Hicks]

Thank you beagledave & Goo for the nice welcomes I’m starting to feel at home already

[loinburger]

Another welcome to you, Hicks.

*Originally posted by Diogenes the Cynic *
1.) Do you belive it is YOUR personal business what my wife does with her body?

Still with the senseless appeals to emotion without even an attempt to be reasonable. Well, if that’s how you want to play it, then answer me this: Why do you believe that your wife has the right to murder her child?

2.) What SHOULD the law be?

For crying out loud, I’m not a lawyer. The long and the short of it is that third trimester abortions should be illegal, and everybody directly involved in the abortion should be either charged with conspiracy, criminal negligence, or 1st/2nd degree murder (depending on mitigating circumstances), i.e. the same as if the victim has been a newborn.

I would actually like to hear some answers to these questions, because they are the only ones that are meaningful.

I don’t know if I should laugh or cry about the fact that you don’t give a fig about whether abortion is right or wrong.

Originally posted by Tee
I take a moderate position on abortion rights (I hear, ‘there is no such thing’…well there is)

Darn right there is! Glad to see that somebody else is in the club.

[Stratocaster]

*Originally posted by Diogenes the Cynic *
**The Supreme Court says so too.

**No, it does not, and I already instructed you as much the last time you brought up this falsehood in another thread. But, hey, don’t let me interrupt your willful ignorance.

**What a gutless response to my question. I’ll ask again:
Is it YOUR personal business what my wife does with her body?

**Jesus, and I thought you offered pitiful arguments in the last thread we discussed abortion. Does this really pass for debate in your circles? I’m gutless, why? Because you like to storm into a thread and throw a hissy fit, and I decide I’m not playing along? Do you think this is intimidating or something, that this somehow distracts people from the fact that you are not actually offering anything of substance?

What you were laying on the table here is called, among those who know how to debate, begging the question. You did not establish that the entity in question is a part of your wife’s body. Your question to me, then, was logically fallacious.

Oh, wait! I forgot: In your world, shouting that something is so, when it is fortified by forceful phrases like “misogynistic anti-choicers” effectively renders anything you state as a universal truth. I’ll try to keep this in mind.:rolleyes:

[Justhink]

Let’s get back to the basics!
Conception is the act of not committing suicide before the sexual organs become viable.
Why? Becuase such a thing as non-consentual rape exists!
You see, anyone who plans success in some aspect of life does simulate potentialities to resolve issues and find the determining variable with regards to a specific problem.

Not committing suicide before sexual organs kick-in is causing the possibility that you will necessarily be terminating a life other than your own. Particularly if you find within your constitution, that you would terminate a pregnancy under given circumstances.

The other potentially reasonable solution is to mutilate the reproductive organs before they begin functioning.

This however still allows the opportunity for someone to steal your eggs after you are dead and still force a child to exist using your hardware against your consent. I believe that the ‘egg-sac’ itself would need to be extracted and burned to avoid this scenario.

Real people with real logic who seek real results make real decisions based on real reasons. If you don’t want to abort a child, you must destroy your reproductive system.

Someone talked about facing the truth earlier here!

The truth is that you cannot protect yourself from all violations of your consent until you have access to an omni-scient system. Telling yourself that you are omni-scient doesn’t make it true.
If you want to not kill another life which has manifested itself into the motions of continuous growth and maturity on this plane, you MUST destroy your reproductive system.

People who seek freedom in a condition where they cannot control everything, must exersize a sacrifice their freedoms (to choose to have a child whenever) in order to compensate for the freedom to not kill another being against their consent.

You always have a choice. The point is that you refuse to make that choice. Abortion can be prevented, always.

-Justhink

[beagledave]

One last try for shits and giggles…

Diogenes the Cynic : you claim that

“The legal definition is that a fetus becomes human when it leaves the birth canal.”
Care to (a) humor us with a legal cite for that nonsense…or (b) realize you fucked up and withdraw that silly baseless claim?

[Stratocaster]

*Originally posted by Justhink *
Let’s get back to the basics!
Conception is the act of not committing suicide before the sexual organs become viable.
Why? Becuase such a thing as non-consentual rape exists!

As opposed to the consensual variety.

[Justhink]

Complaining about the entire topic is irrelevant as the topic itself is preventable; though extreme measures are required at this juncture - a form of pro-active consent measures which equal physically impossible barriers of consent violation.

Let me put it this way. Why are you complaining about shortness of breath and lung cancer and/or emphysema when you smoke cigarettes like a fiend. here you have two conflicing ideas:

My consent to smoke cigarettes because I enjoy them
My non-consent to pay the long term consequences.

With our CURRENT technology, this is an either/or proposition… you smoke or you don’t smoke.

As we progress technologically, we will certainly be able to harmonize BOTH consents. People will be able to smoke and not worry about suffering these consequences. That is the future, that is not NOW.

NOW, at this moment, the choice is supremely black and white…
The encryption falls back on abstinence or physical measures which force life-long abstinence such as filling your system with a drug which causes you extreme suffering when nicotine enters your system so as to force your body to not smoke. If this chemical reaction can be maintained, you will effectively not be smoking for your entire life… a decision YOU made with the understanding that YOU are vulnerable and will confront moments of weakness.

The same is true with regards to having a child. You can do physical preparations to assure that this issue cannot physically come up. BY NOT TAKING THESE STEPS, YOU ARE CONSENTING TO THE ACCEPTANCE OF ABORTION IF YOU CONSIDER CERTAIN TYPES OF PREGNANCIES TO REQUIRE ABORTION.

This is the reality of the situation. With regards to cigarettes, you may wish to smoke and not get lung cancer, shortness of breath, reduced circulation to the body and brain as much as you want; but we have not bridged this consent gap technologically yet.
YOU must aknowledge that this consent gap has not been bridged technologically yet in order to truly understand you decision making process with regards to your ability to formulate your own consent against opposing violations of this consent.
BY not taking the necessary, known effective steps to completely prevent the issue from occurring, you are GAMBLING with your consent with regards to ANOTHER LIFE.

I don’t know about you people; but I don’t want to be born against the consent of another human being… particularly the ones who acted as the direct genetic vessels for my being.

The abortion duality itself can be prevented currently, to collapse the POINT of having this debate. The only reason the debate continues is not because of the logic of what is responsible here, but a complaint that we can’t have it both ways yet.

The point is that you as a human being can make absolutely certain that the unwanted side effects of this debate cannot occur to you without your consent.

You have that choice right now.

-Justhink

[Justhink]

*Originally posted by Bob Cos *
**As opposed to the consensual variety. **

My goof. Thank you Bob. Non consentual sex (not non-consentual rape :smack: )

-Justhink