Aeschines, I think you may be close to a record for the most hysterical Godwinisms in one thread.
What’s a “Godwinism”?
To answer the OP’s (ignoring the rest of this ridiculous conversation) question, no, I would not abort. Being pro-life is about respecting all life – not just the lives of healthy babies, or babies that will be convenient to your lifestyle.
What’s a Godwinism?
So I suppose that you no longer wish to be known as “the Cynic”, eh?
And DTC, I don’t care what your God or any government has to say about it. Science trumps all of them, and science says that a beating heart and a functioning brain is life. And your consistent misuse of logic isn’t helping your argument.
Well, surely this is a little idiosyncratic in itself; it’s certainly arbitrary. Do you really believe that something significant happens in the process of birth itself that imbues the child with personhood? In essence, it seems a bit like you’re letting your position on abortion rights dictate your definition of personhood, rather than letting the latter inform the former (I realise that this is something some anti-abortionists do, also).
Now, I realise that any definition of the point of becoming a person is going to be arbitrary, and that’s why I’m not advocating defining such a thing. Rather than picking an arbitrary point, is it not better to just consider that it happens somewhere in between conception and birth, and factor this in to your decision as seems appropriate? I find it hard to believe that you would really consider a baby mere hours before birth to be nothing more than a “clot of cells”. Remember, we’re talking about the reasoning behind personal decisions here, not a justification for taking away a person’s right to choose, something I don’t support. I just don’t think that insisting on a non-person foetus is necessary to justify the right to choose, and I think it encourages a blase attitude to the very serious decision that must be made.
Aeschines, a Godwinism is basically a Nazi/Hitler reference. There’s more to it than that, but that’s what it’s come to mean.
Oh, I agree, but that wasn’t what the OP was asking.
Oh right. Got it.
Fair enough. It’s legal. Whether or not you feel that it is acceptable is your call to make for you and yours. You don’t like the law, work to change it. Keep in mind, though, that a lot of people such as myself will fight to keep the law as it is.
Waste
So… any brain function denotes life, even as Karen Ann Quinlan where only autonomic brain functions remained until her death?
Your lack of citation on the specific point where the blob of cells goes from being a sperm and an egg to sentient being does not reflect your surety.
I don’t see a misuse of logic on Diogenes part, but I do see a lack of substantiation on yours with impassioned criticism standing in the place of information.
I didn’t say it wasn’t alive, I said it wasn’t a person. Do you understand the difference? A lobster has a heart and a brain, that doesn’t make it a person.
Dead Badger, you’re exactly correct, any line we draw has got to be arbitrary, so I’m drawing the line that infringes least on the entity we know is a person.
As to the extreme (and really pretty much theoretical) question of a full term fetus being aborted, I would say that the woman’s right to terminate the pregnancy still holds…BUT…the termination of a pregnancy in that circumstance doesn’t mean that the fetus has to be killed. I would say that a woman has the right to end a pregnancy at any time but if it’s possible to end the pregnancy without killing the fetus, then an effort should be made to do so. The mother need not be obligated to accept any legal or financial obligation for the baby and she would still be getting what she wanted, an end to her pregnancy. Once the fetus is out of her body and can survive on its own, it’s a person.
I still think the above scenario would be a rarity, though. 90% of abortions are peformed in the first trimester and almost all of the rest are performed in the second. Only a fraction of one percent are performed after six months and virtually all of those are performed for extremely compelling medical reasons 9quite often after the fetus has already died).
Purely elective abortion just doesn’t happen in the third trimester but if such a situation were to present itself, I say just deliver the baby alive through induction or caesarian or whatever and send the woman on her way. I think such incidents would be vanishingly rare, though.
Exactly, which no one does, and which is precisely the reason that abortions should be outlawed. If we’re not sure whether ir not it’s an actual “person”, shouldn’t we give it the benefit of the doubt? And it’s quite irritating to hear people come up with nonsensical justifications like: “It’s just a mass of cells.” Puhleeze! Everyone knows that it’s BS, and the real reason for this belief is pure self-servience.
But there isn’t any doubt. A blob of cells is not a “person” by any rational definition, and the “benefit of the doubt” should go to the entity who we know is a person, i.e. the woman. When you have a conflict between an actual person and an imaginary person, the actual person has to win.
How is it BS? How is a non-sentient mass of cells anything more than a non-sentient mass of cells? Warning: answers based on religious belief will be rejected as scientifically and legally worthless.
Interesting thread. My brother died of muscular dystrophy about six months ago, and my wife just got pregnant.
We are electing to have genetic testing done, and will abort immediately if anything serious turns up.
I am against abortion if the fetus is advanced enough to suffer. If for some reason we were prevented from getting tested until the third trimester, we would probably not do it.
My brother suffered a great deal in his shortened life. He developed normally until he was about two. Then my mother noticed that he couldn’t stand up without using his hands in an unusual way. That was when we found out he had MD. He walked more or less normally when he was a little boy, but was never able to run. At about 10, he lost the ability to walk and went into a wheelchair. Over the next few years he got weaker and weaker, had several operations to relieve contractures, and at about 17 he could no longer eat. (He had to be fed before that, but later could not eat even if fed - they installed a feeding tube through which liquid food was passed while he slept.) In his last few years, he did not have the strength to be out of bed for more than a couple of hours at a time. He couldn’t breathe well on his own and lived in constant terror of catching a cold that would cause him to suffocate on his own mucus. He used a breathing machine most of the day. At 24, he died in his sleep when his heart stopped. (MD affects the heart muscle as well).
I don’t want to turn this into a eulogy, but I will just say that he was intellectually a very capable person. In fact, when he was stuck in bed, I tried to get him to post to the SDMB just to keep him active, but he couldn’t do it because he was unable to type or use any of the assistive devices they have for that sort of thing. Plus, he hardly ever complained, which I attribute to very strong character and not wanting to upset my parents, who were obviously devastated watching him die in slow motion over a ten-year period.
Given a choice between that and aborting a very early-term fetus…it is an easy choice for me. Having been through the whole cycle, it’s hard not to think of it in terms of “do I feel my brother’s life was not worth living?” I don’t know how to answer that for him or for anyone else. But ending a life before it gets started means that such scenarios are never considered. We don’t lose sleep worrying about all the dead sperm we leave in various places and whether we have deprived a future person of life (except in Monty Python movies). I don’t see an early-term abortion as much different.
I am back from the airport. There seems to be an influx of Sudanese pilgrims for some reason.
In any case, I would not vote for turning off life support for Karen Ann Quinlan. She was in a prolonged vegetative state, but she most assuredly was a person and so deserving of our protection. If we are allowed to kill her because she is in an extreme medical state, are we that far from bumping off grandma?
Heck she is just going to die so anyway.
Anyway it is a slippery slope and we ought to proceed with the greatest of caution.
If you’d like, I can go through and list the logical fallacies out for you. It will have to be later, since I’m at work. And I’m not very passionate about the abortion issue at all. I’ve really never even argued it with anyone. And honestly, I have no problem with people who are pro-choice who actually admit that it’s the most practical thing to do sometimes, thereby admitting that it’s pure selfishness. It’s the opinions that proclaim that life doesn’t start 'til birth (always backed by poor reasoning/logic) that get to me.
Diogenes, does this mean you would oppose late-term abortion except to protect the health of the mother, if it could be shown that a late-term fetus were sentient, i.e. able to suffer?
Dude, I don’t even believe in God so stop assuming that I do.