What’s the number of dead women that you find to be acceptable?
None. That doesn’t change the fact that an extremely small number of deaths already happen with legal abortions and the evidence indicates it won’t change even if we do ban abortion.
An argument Weddington made to SCOTUS in Roe v Wade was that in Texas historically an abortion was a crime against the woman i.e. the doctor was the criminal. I think this puts into context what Qin Shi Huangdi points out that abortions that killed the mother would be considered by many at the time to be similar to a patient dying after a medical procedure.
If abortion is to be illegal, then may as well do it right and make the laws and penalties properly reflect that cultural perspective: the woman should be forced to recant her sins on the Holy Bible in the presence of the high priest and the village elders, thus purifying her soul, then taken to the village square and stoned to death.
It is perfectly possible to oppose legalized abortion on secular grounds.
Yes, but not on objectively rational grounds, because objective criteria don’t exist. The opposition to abortion always comes down to dismissing a woman’s rights in favor of some ethereal belief system, whether it’s based on religion or some other imaginary matter of faith.
“Rights” are based on a belief system.
They can be, but rights can also be objectively derived from moral philosophies, particularly the area of normative ethics that governs how we should behave towards each other, without requiring any recourse to subjective belief systems. Most of us have little difficulty understanding what we mean by basic human rights even without those formalisms. The problem that anti-abortionists have is that they try to apply labels like “human life” or even “sentience” in ways that are scientifically unsupportable. What to them is an “obvious” moral case is actually a matter of faith or just visceral emotion – not something that can ever be resolved by any medical science or moral philosophy. And yet they will argue that this is somehow more important than the indisputable human rights that they seek to violate.
You are always going to have to start with some axiom(s) that cannot be proven to be objectively true. And keep in mind that “most of us” do not agree that a woman has the right to terminate her pregnancy at will, so I’m not seeing that as a useful argument in favor of abortion rights.
I’m about as pro-choice as they come, and I agree that many of the argument used by parts of the pro-life camp are scientifically questionable at best, and downright wrong at worst, but let’s not pretend to have some special, objective knowledge that says a human being must be defined in a specific way.
I would say viability of the fetus is suitably objective. I’m pro-choice but I wouldn’t oppose a law banning abortion if the fetus is medically viable absent extraordinary means.
This should be the penalty for those who would try to enforce their religious beliefs on the rest of us.
Immanuel Kant, among many, many practitioners of the many philosophies of ethics, would certainly disagree with you.
“Most of us” might be willing to grant that there is room for debate in late-term situations like into the third trimester with a healthy viable fetus (not that we would necessarily ban abortions at that stage, but we understand that at this point the pro-lifer argument has at least a semblance of logic), but by the same token in very early stages of pregnancy there is no sane basis for debate – something many proponents of the “other side”, being emotionally and irrationally driven, will not grant, ever. The fact that some would argue that at this stage the woman has absolutely no rights over what are essentially biochemical processes occurring in her body with huge implications for her future is just astounding and mind-bogglingly cruel, like something from medieval times. We’ve had all these arguments before.
We all clearly understand what a human being is; the problem arises when religionists start to abuse the term for ideological ends. I myself am comfortable with how it’s been settled in Canadian law, where an infant becomes a protected human being when it’s born and takes its first breath, and doesn’t try to prescribe draconian penalties and an arbitrary legal definition for something that is neither medically nor philosophically definable.
Well, they’re wrong. Or you misinterpreting them or me.
OK, now you’re jumping around. I was referring to your “most of us” comment and if you look at polls, “most of us [Americans]” don’t think, for example, that women should be allowed to abort if the fetus is the wrong gender. Now, if you want to go back to the “sane” argument, that’s a different story. I was just saying that I would not fall back on “most of us” if I were trying to make the argument you are trying to make.
Emphasis added. I don’t know why you keep saying that, since we clearly have many different ideas. But maybe things are different in Canada. I was speaking from an American perspective. Our abortion laws are quite liberal compared to much of Western Europe even if we have many more activists trying to make them less so.
BTW, I believe you and I have been around the block on this at least once before. I doubt we are going to break any new ground this time. 
Just as a point of information: are there any cases on record of what’s essentially a pre-term Caesarian operation, in which someone (the mother, father, doctor, or anyone else) requested that the able-to-breathe-and-feed-on-its-own baby be killed?
What I describe above is pretty much the situation that those who oppose all pregnancy terminations equate with “abortion” (as a matter of tactics). That’s why many anti-abortion billboards, for example, show a happy, healthy–and usually blue-eyed blond–ten month old baby with the “I have a beating heart at six weeks after conception!” message. If the billboard showed an actual human embryo at the six-weeks stage, the “killing babies” claim would seem less clear-cut. The emotions of viewers wouldn’t be engaged in the same way, if the billboard-makers employed truthful depictions.
But how common is the “viable child taken from the mother and killed, on the excuse that this is ‘legal abortion’” situation (which anti-abortion activists tend to posit as being what abortion always IS)? Does that ever happen in the USA, for example?..healthy eight-month pregnancies ending in the child being removed and killed?
Or is that just what anti-abortion activists would like us to picture, when we think of abortion?
Of course, it is vital to keep strict controls over what women are allowed to do. People must give women proper guidance. It’s for their own good.
It’s not, it’s purely a technological definition that moves as technology advances. And in practice amount to a creeping illegalization of abortion.
Gee I’m sorry if advancing medical technology manages to extend the window in which a baby can live outside its mother’s womb. Do you believe there is any appropriate time limit to abortion?
You mean, the time limit where a woman can be forced to serve as an incubator.
Birth.
I’m not sure why there’s any need for snark. The fact that medical technology advances means that yes, the “window” extends. Which makes viability a very tricky and movable line of demarcation, right? And therefore may not in itself be as objective a measurement as Saint Cad argues?
Or do you disagree?
At what point precisely can abortion no longer be performed? When the head is 1 inch outside the birth canal? When the head is 1/100 inch outside the birth canal? When the baby is 100% born?