Out of interest - what would you say of abortion because the mother had sex with protection which didn’t work?
It is not clear to me or to many that the like of another human is on the line. Axiomatic difficulty.
Also, don’t move the goalposts. All of the things I mentioned are places where one group is attempting to force it’s moral beliefs on another–“a human is on the line” is a late addition.
That’s right, because I never argued it was always invalid to argue from morality.
This.
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I don’t accept the UN’s authority to make an authoritative definition.
Then why are you here?
Yet, if someone because unaware and unfeeling, they do not lose their status under the law. Why do you seemingly not understand this?
Iirc, most people die of a specific disease which affects a specific organ. Few people die of diseases which render all of their organs unusable, or just plain old age to where their body just “shut down”.
And if you either become unaware or stop thinking, then do you lose your status as a person?
So brain death = mentally handicapped?
Hardly. Why would you think that? They ARE just mindless pieces of meat, just as my liver is.
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No. Pick up a biology book (or read the link I provided you).
You’re confusing sentience and sapience. Humans, as far as we know, are the only sapient creatures. Most every animal is sentient.
Good point. :smack:
Well, er, replace all my mentions of sentience with sapience then, and pretend that’s what I said first. 
This isn’t a matter of “axiomatic” difficulty. This is simply a group of people refusing to accept what has been known to be true for the past 40+ years.
I’m not moving the goalposts. Notice that my original post said more-or-less.
So you’re saying it’s always valid to argue from morality? Actually, it doesn’t matter, for the point was that the whole “don’t force your morals on others!” line is an attempt to avoid having to defend one’s position, and is an intellectual cop-out. You more than likely do it to others on a regular basis, so why pretend to have an issue with it now?
I don’t know, actually.
Yes, because you aren’t a person anymore if your mind is destroyed.
Mentally handicapped enough to not be a person = brain death, or close to it.
It has come up; I think there was an instance where a man was tried for murder after smothering his anencephalic baby with a pillow, but as I cant remember where I read it, it’s not much of an argument. Also, as it has already been pointed out, brain dead bodies are not allowed to be harvested for organs in most countries, at least not without prior consent, or the consent of their surviving relatives.
Anyway, I don’t really think that who can and can’t be harvested legally is a very good mesaure of who should be accorded rights or not. The fact that something is done or can be done doesn’t automatically mean that it is right to do it, merely that it should be a matter of ethical consideration.
What’s been known to be true? I’m sure we’ve known that fetuses develop into babies for longer than that. The question is, as always, the interplay between the moral right of the fetus to life and the moral right of the mother to not have her bodily fluids and cavities invaded without her consent.
Don’t tell me “having sex means consenting to pregnancy”, either, because that’d make pregnancy the one thing we can’t revoke consent on after the fact.
It’s a good thing you’re not being judgmental:dubious:
Anyways, I agree that a pregnancy should be ended when a Dr. has declared that the mother’s life is at risk.
I think it should be illegal for a woman to kill her child because that child is an INCONVENIENCE.
I would still be against it because no form of birth control is 100% effective…only abstinence or a hysterectomy is 100% effective.
I am absolutely being judgmental of you. I never said I wasn’t. I just found it ironic that you were calling others out on being condescending when you were being equally so.
You still refuse to address the point. I am not here to explore your point of view- you’ve made your point of view crystal clear. I am asking to explore your lack of willingness to hold other people’s moral conclusions with respect, if not agreement. You are the one dismissing entire groups of people that have come to complex decisions (as you have as well), but whose decision differ from yours, and hold them with contempt. To equate them as criminals.
When you yourself agree that there is occasion to allow abortion. If caring for a baby would put the mother’s life at risk we don’t kill that baby, we find it a home. But with a pregnancy we can’t. I judge your lack of respect that good moral people can come to differing conclusions on hard moral decisions. You bet I judge that attitude. A lack of respect for people that deep is offensive to me.
I don’t agree with all reasons for abortion myself. Frankly, women who abort for purely selfish reasons (like sex of the baby) turn my stomach as well. But I choose to live in a world where abortion is safe and legal, even if some abuse the system. You don’t have to agree, but don’t call me the same as a criminal for coming to a different conclusion. That’s the issue I’m trying to debate.
You are doing ALL of the same things you accuse me of doing. Can’t you see that?
I think abortion is immoral. That is my belief and it’s not going to change.
You show no respect at all for my point of view either. All the pro-choicers freak out when I say I am against abortion. You pro-choicers have already won the battle. Abortion is legal. You guys should be happy. That is all.
EVERYONE will stop making personal comments about other posters.
This thread concerns a very narrow question that, regardless of one’s views of abortion, can be discussed on its own limited set of facts. Stick to that discussion and leave the questions of who is “judgmental” or “condescending” or any other qualitative assessment for The BBQ Pit.
[ /Moderating ]
This position is morally definitive and it makes a lot of presumptions, which you can make as a member of our society, but you have to be aware of your decision to allow rules lke “whatever her heart desires”, desire being an emotion and not part of objective reality.
You’re injecting heavy emotional value into those two considerations which is the main cause of your perceived “unhappiness”.
If you’re willing to allow a woman to make any reproductive choice “her heart desires”, like it’s a 30 second tv commercial about contraceptives, then that choice has answered your question that you seem to have a conflict with.
The easy way out of the conflict is this:
You acknowledge value of a fetus only after the human that was responsible for the fetus’ viability has made a decision to keep it alive until birth.
This stance will reconcile your first and seemingly primary position of allowing a woman whatever reproductive choice “her heart desires”.
I’m sorry, but I disagree. I do not “freak out”- I disagree but respect your right to hold your opinion. I do not think you wrong as a person for coming to whatever conclusion you can live with. What concerns me is the lack of respect for those of us who come to a different conclusion. You may think we are wrong, but that doesn’t mean we are akin to criminals. Can you not see the difference between me respecting your right to have your opinion and still disagreeing with it? All I ask for is the same. Think I’m wrong, fine, but recognize that this is difficult issue for most people and good moral people can come to differing opinions.
This is directly linked to the OP in that the question asked is “Can you be pro-choice and think the fetus is a baby”. The answer is yes. You can even think abortion is immoral and still hold respect for the person that holds the contrary point of view. That is what it means to be pro-choice. Recognizing that there can be multiple valid opinions because not one of us has a hotline on what is the truth. I cannot explain this any clearer.
To Tomndeb: My apologies for letting the rhetoric get out of hand. I was truly upset at the characterizations and lost my cool.
The difference is that our beliefs include your belief as it pertains to you. We believe that you should have the legal right to not have an abortion. We believe that other women should have the legal right to have an abortion in the least restrictive yet safest way possible, as it pertains to them.
The pro-life belief, on the other hand, does not include our beliefs and they pertain to us. These people believe, not just morally but legally, that we should not have the right to have an abortion.
True, abortion is at the moment, legal. It is NOT least restrictive, however, and lots of people are working hard at making it illegal, or at least so unbearably restrictive that it may as well be unavailable. So we have to continue to work at maintaining the legality as it is, and also work to decrease those restrictions not needed for safety, like a limited number of locations that provide abortions (I believe all of South Dakota is down to ZERO abortion providers, meaning that almost every woman who wants an abortion in SD needs to incur significant costs in travel, lodging and time off of work in addition to the abortion costs themselves), waiting periods (again, requiring additional days off work and extra money for more visits), parental permissions (restrictive in obvious ways) and forcing women to watch their ultrasounds when they don’t want to (ditto).
WhyNot, you are off topic.
Open a new thread in the appropriate forum, but drop your hijack in this thread.
[ /Moderating ]
Well, I said poverty was correlated with child abuse (and your cited study agrees), and lack of abortion access reinforces poverty, so the relationship is transitive. Besides, your cited study has a few problems, including a fairly small sample size, chosen from a population that is already overwhelmingly poor, unemployed and already receiving the attention of social workers. Looking at the data, I gather:
237 mothers, all receiving social aid, the vast majority (97.5%) single parents, the vast majority (96.2%) unemployed, a significant majority (72%) having less than a high-school education.
Of these, 160 had never had an abortion, 49 had had one abortion, 28 had had two or more abortions. The study is comparing a population of 77 to one of 160. This is a pretty small sample size, some of the data was “self-selected”, (i.e. respondents could choose whether or not to respond to some questions), a number of criteria were vague/subjective at best (i.e. trying to control for "“Not having felt loved by one’s parents during childhood”)…
It’s not a study I’d give a whole lot of weight to, myself. I can think of at least one alternate interpretation - women who make bad impulsive short-sighted decisions are more likely to (a) get pregnant when they don’t want to, and (b) abuse their kids. (a) could prompt getting an abortion, and though it correlates with (b) in the sense that a person who makes bad decisions is vulnerable to (a) and (b), an abortion-resolution to (a) doesn’t cause (b), by any mechanism I can see.
Conversely, women who make calmer, rational decisions are more likely to (a) be more careful with birth control and avoid unwanted pregnancies and (b) resist the impulse to abuse their children. Abortion is made irrelevant.
Further, the study defines (but does not explore the significance of) “maltreatment” as “the mothers were either the perpetrators of the maltreatment or they allowed someone else to mistreat their children.” So if a woman has one or more children, and somewhere along the way gets an abortion, and somewhere also along the way gets a boyfriend or husband who abuses her (and possibly his) children, the study is trying to find if the abortion is a relevant factor? I’d suggest that of the 160 women in the study who have never had abortions, we get some data about how many are not sexually active at all, hence no boyfriends or husbands. These women won’t be getting abortions, because they won’t be getting pregnant, and their children are not at risk of abuse from her (nonexistent) boyfriend(s).
Basically, I’ve read your cited study and find it has some fairly significant flaws which makes me wonder how effectively it has (or even if it has) proven its premise.
In any case, I see you’re arguing with Der Trihs over the “person / not person” labelling issue. Good luck with that.
It’s also false in the United States, but you seem to have conveniently ignored my post.
So, do you believe that a fetus is a human being deserving of protection, or not? Surely if you do believe, in black and white terms, that abortion is murder and the killing of a baby, then that is the case no matter the situation?
By saying that exceptions for risk to the mother’s life are okay, you are making the judgement that some unborn babies are worthier of the chance at life than others.
A tubal pregnancy can also be the consequence of sex without protection. how do you reconcile that? Do you only allow termination of ectopic pregnancies in the instance that the woman used protection and it failed?
If you think it’s okay that ectopic pregnancies are aborted, then you are pro-choice. Simple.