This is definitely just a comment I have. I believe that the pregnancy lasting 9 months gives people more opportunity to dismiss the child within the womb as a “mass of cells”. What if a pregancy only lasted 9 minutes from conception to birth? Wouldn’t most people then change their opinions on whether abortion should be legal?
It’s convenient to say that the fetus is “just a blob of cells,” but it’s also exceedingly dishonest. Sadly, women have been hearing this lie for decades now, even though medical science shows it to be untrue.
When a person goes past the EPT test and gets into OB care that can determine that there are potential problems, you have most likely decided that you want to carry the pregnancy to term.
I think the OP was asking the question in emotional terms. I personally would have no moral problem with it, but if I wanted the child, and was told it would be disabled, I might feel like I betrayed it or something…like you already have an emotional attachment to it. That’s just the vibe I got from the OP. I could be wrong…
I hadn’t looked at it that way until now, but I do think that there’s a selfish, or convience issue at hand, and I don’t find fault with that. It’s a complex problem and the answer will come to a person from many directions.
Agreed.
I’ve already answered this question. Scroll up. Termination of pregancy need not result in the death of a fetus.
No, you said “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.” What if it’s not possible? I think it is far from settled whether a fetus that is not advanced enough to survive outside the womb is also not advanced enough to suffer.
Look at the first sentence in the OP (my bolding):
I don’t know what EPT stands for, but I read that sentence as saying you didn’t even know there was a pregnancy until right now. Sounds like you wouldn’t have any time to decide about full term or not.
Answering before reading other folks’ posts, but if my partner were pregnant (and it would have to be her, I’ve got the other equipment), the authority to make that call would reside with her, not me.
Assuming she’s interested in my opinion and recommendations, I’d be in favor of an abortion, but then I’d favor one anyhow. (I’ve gone to the trouble of getting a vasectomy to diminish the likelihood of this scenario —I do not think abortion is a good form of birth control — but if the little tubules somehow knit themselves together spontaneously and her menopause reverses itself and she gets pregnant, I would hope she’d opt for an abortion for no reason other than “I don’t want a kid right now”).
But as I said, her call, not mine.
Then the fetus is going to die. So what? If it’s insufficiently developed to live outside of a host then it’s insufficiently devoloped to have any rights of personhood. It’s basically nothing more than a tumerous growth.
Suffering is not a criterion for personhood. Animals suffer, that diesn’t stop us from killing them. Having said that, I would argue that a non-viable fetus should be terminated in the quickest and most painless way available so as to avoid the possibility of fetal suffering.
EPT is Early Pregnancy Test (a home test). Usually, you’ll miss a period, take a couple home tests, and then make the doctor’s appointment. No sense spending all that money without a 99% certainty that you’re pregnant. If you don’t want the baby, your call is usually to an abortion clinic; not an OB.
Also, although it’s been a long time since I’ve seen an OB, I think you have to be a couple months along before most of the tests are done to determine if there might be a problem. You have definitely been living with the idea of parenthood for a while when you get the news that there might be a defect.
A fetus is not “part of” another person’s body. It is connected to another person’s body, contained within another person’s body, but not “part of”. The fetus has its own, wholly self-contained, body. A fetus has its own circulatory, respiratory, urinary, nervous, muscular, skeletal, reproductive, and digestive system. The heart is not made up of little bits of the mother’s heart. The brain is not made up of little bits of the mother’s brain. The mother’s body supplies the raw materials through the placenta and that is as far as it goes.
Biologically an arm is part of a body. A fetus is contained within a body, but is not part of it. If it were part of it then blood types would never vary from mother to child.
Enjoy,
Steven
“Life” does not a “human” make.
So now that we’ve admitted that the fetus is indeed a life, we can take the next step and show that it’s a human life. Let’s see, human DNA (check), human heart (check), human hands, feet, fingernails, hair, tongue, etc. (check all of the above). The day that humans begin giving birth to dogs is the day that your quote becomes valid.
Recognizing that we’re nitpicking around the periphery of the real issue…
I think you’re also assuming that the OP is aware of and has framed his argument consistent with standard medical realities.
It is sometimes out of selfishness, but in the case of medical deficiencies, it is about the future child’s life as well.
I believe that when the fetus can survive outside the mother’s womb, it is a child. This rarely happens before the 6 month point.
It’s still inside the woman’s body, though, and what is inside her body is unmistakeably a part of her, at least far as rights go.
Juggernaut, don’t get too carried away. Semantic gamesmanship is not going to win anything for you. The word “human being” is too subjective and ambiguous to have any value. A clot of tissue is never going to be a person no matter how much you huff and puff.
As usual with abortion threads, we’ve got away from the narrow topic of the OP and disintegrated into a general catfight over the morality of abortion. I think the OP was basically asking for opinions about whether there is any moral distinction between aborting a healthy fetus and aborting a sick or mal developed fetus. The ironic thing is that, if you look past the bickering, there actually seems to be some agreement that there is not a moral difference. Most everyone seems to think it’s wrong in both cases or acceptable in both cases. I haven’t really seen anyone split their judgement and say one is ok and not the other.
OK, now that I’ve read the entire thread, I see that it’s devolved into yet another “Is the fetus a person” discussion.
It doesn’t matter, it isn’t the decisive question.
Explanatory Note: “Sneeze people” in the above-referenced post refers to the caricature / strawman version of prochoice in which abortion is justified on the grounds that it’s a moral nonissue like a sneeze, “no issue, just tissue”.
I’m pro-choice; the Lovely and Talented Mrs. Shodan is pro-life. Therefore, we would not abort, in the situation described in the OP. (I am assuming the fetus is non-viable.)
Nor would we abort if it were the other way around. This would be something we needed to agree on.
But if someone in the situation asked me for my advice, I would say to abort. To me, it is more like knowing in advance that some specific sexual encounter would result in becoming pregnant with a disabled fetus. I would act to avoid this with contraception, and try again later. Same with the abortion. I would act to avoid the formation of a disabled person, by aborting the pregnancy.
Regards,
Shodan
PS - Best wishes and God’s blessings to you, Mr. Moto, Mrs. Moto, and all the little Motos here and yet to be!
This makes no sense. Rights are social concepts, they don’t depend on physical things like location. Society could easily(and has in the case of term limits on abortion or outlawing it entirely) decide that “rights” extend to the self-contained fetus within the woman. The placenta is a border, biologically, between female and fetus. Why must social concepts ignore this border?
Enjoy,
Steven
True. Isn’t that why Scott Peterson is being tried for the double-murder of his wife and their unborn child?
I completely reject your desiganation of the placenta as a “border” as being specious in the extreme. Whatever exists inside of another person cannot be said with any intellectual honesty to be separated from that person.