Why’s that?
I ask, because it’s a very different way of thinking about morality than how I think about it. In my mind, you should try to inhabit whatever state you consider best, regardless of what state you’re currently in. That is to say, if you think that being hooked up to the violinist is better than not being hooked up, you should volunteer to hook yourself up if you’re not already, and if you think that not being hooked up is better, you should unhook yourself if you are attached.
A fetus is not a baby. It is a potential baby. The Mayo Clinic says 15 to 20 percent of pregnancies miscarry. They think it is probably even greater than that because some occur very early and go unnoticed. But to declare it a sure baby is incorrect.
So nothing?
Fair point, but the fetus does have a brain and central nervous system by the 10th week, and might just be able to feel pain by the end of the first trimester (according to Susan Lee et al.: “Fetal Pain A Systematic Multidisciplinary Review of the Evidence”. The Journal of the American Medical Association, August 24/31, 2005). Where I live it is legal to abort the pregnancy at this point.
Anyway, I’m not trying to determine whether or not fetuses can feel pain, or at what stage; my point was rather that abortion can easily be defended, even if the fetus should be able to suffer.
Plenty of versions of Christianity hold that no one is innocent, and denied babies heaven under various circumstances. And why are you assuming that if there’s an after life, the innocent go to the more pleasant aspects of it? If one buys the idea that the devout towards the One True God are rewarded, babies would logically be condemned since they can’t be devout at all.
For that matter, even assuming that there’s an afterlife there’s no reason to assume that any of it is pleasant for anyone. The most logical version of an afterlife would be that we all go insane as we float in a blind, deaf, voiceless void; sensationless and totally isolated since we no longer have any method of perception or communication. Assuming that the afterlife is good is at least as much a matter of irrational faith as assuming it exists at all.
What do you think? I, for my part, wouldn’t presume to know. If I happen to die in the near future I promise that I shall do everything I can to post a post mortem message on this thread to let you know what it’s like.
It doesn’t work that way. One doesn’t get to claim that there are things worse than death, and when asked what those things are respond with “Well, I can’t say. What do you think?”.
Dunno who said it, but I can imagine circumstances such as a “aware, but unable to consciously control my body” or various forms of torture as being worse than death. Especially since my belief system doesn’t count death as a “bad” thing.
So if the unborn weren’t aborted, then they’d later be “aware, but unable to consciously control their bodies” and/or tortured, both of which would be worse than being dead?
I was offering an answer to the question you asked, I thought I was clear I had no context. 
Certainly the potential for both of those things exists.
If we’re talking about a fate worse than abortion, for a potential unwanted infant?
All, under certain circumstances, could EASILY qualify.
Of course it is irrational. But it is a matter of belief, and as such doesn’t have to adhere to the rules of logic. In order for afterlife scenarios to have any importance to this kind of discussion one has to make a few presumptions though:
On this basis, I don’t think it was all that irrational of me to assume that fetuses might be better of in a religious afterlife scenario than most other people. On the other hand I’ll happily admit that logic may not apply on this front at all, but if that should be the case, then we needn’t discuss it here, and I apologise for even bringing it up in the first place.
I don’t think I ever did claim that there is definitely anything worse than dying. On the contrary, I base my entire exsistence on the belief that there is something better than dying. Apparently so do you, or you probably wouldn’t have bothered to stay alive.
Before I’m hooked up to the violinist, I have no particular moral obligations to him. He will die if he’s not hooked up to someone. He could be hooked up to me, he could be hooked up to you, he could be hooked up to some guy down the street. I don’t have any more control over his fate than you do, and so I don’t have any special responsibilities you don’t.
Once I’m hooked up to the violinist, I’m in a unique position. If he’s unhooked from me until the nine months are up, he will die. I hold this man’s life or death entirely in my hands. That added power gives me an additional responsibility that I didn’t have before the hookup. If I unhook myself, I and I alone will kill the man. I’m not willing to kill another person at the price of nine months’ inconvenience to myself. (I am going to demand, though, that the assholes who hooked me up to the violinist put me in a room with cable, HBO, and a laptop, though).
It’s possible if one hates children
Less snarky answer: Possible if you believe that death is not a negative, and if the fetus never experiences life, or dying, then it’s not losing anything
All I’m going to say is that once you’ve seen a 9-10 week fetus with a beating heart on the ultrasound, you’re unlikely to ever think of it as anything less than a baby that’s not quite done yet.
I can on the other hand see how you could look at a 5-6 week fetus that’s a yolk sac and fetal pole, and not really be particularly moved.
To nitpick, I asked what’s worse than death. How is death worse than death? It doesn’t matter how it’s brought about, whether because one is stuffed into a trash can and left to die or has their heart stopped/head caved in, the end result is that the individual is dead. Arguing that one is better than the other doesn’t make much sense. The concept of a humane killing is an oxymoron.
(And, yes, I ignored the fact that you’re operating under the implicit assumption that if a woman iss denied an abortion she’d just throw her child away.)
There are many individuals alive today who were negatively affected by their mother’s actions while they were still in the womb. Are you saying they should have been aborted, or that their lives are inherently worth less than someone who was born perfectly healthy or not addicted to any substance? It amazes me that the same indidivuals who proclaim that women should have the right to decide their own fates turn around and then argue that some individual’s life would not be worth living because of the actions of his or her mother. That individual should be allowed to live and grow up, and then later if (s)he decides that his or her life is no longer worth living, then (s)he should can. But that’s a decision the individual makes about their own life, not a decision someone else makes for him or her.
As it is, I have a question for you; if it’s better to be aborted than it is to be born addicted or damaged due to the mother’s substance intake, then is it better to kill someone than to let them continue to live addicted or damaged due to their mother’s substance intake? If not, then how are you differentiating the two?
Essentially, what you are saying is that some women have a predisposition to harming their children, and to protect those children from being harmed by their mothers, we should kill them. Does that really make sense to you? That’s even worse than killing someone to protect them from current abuse (which would net you a quick jail sentence), as you’re acting not upon what has happened, but what might happen.
No, they couldn’t.
Rather obviously, in one case you have a damaged person, and in the other you have something that isn’t a person yet. There’s no moral equivalence between killing a mindless fetus and killing a person, any more than there is an equivalence between eating an apple and cannibalizing your neighbor.
Just FTR, the OP *does *in fact think that fetus = baby (at least for a colloquial/emotional definition of the term), which is what’s causing the whole difficulty in the first place.
If I did in fact think that a fetus was an insensate lump of tissue until it magically transmogrifies into a baby at the moment of birth, the issue of women’s reproductive choice wouldn’t be as loaded for me.
Regardless, even given that I think that the fetus is a pre-person, the individual circumstances cover such a wide range of possibilities that the reality is impossible to legislate fairly in a broad morally restrictive manner (ie: abortions are wrong, period, full-stop, no leeway - or, abortions are wrong and it is therefore incumbent on the woman to prove her situation worthy of initiating that moral wrong) and *not *screw over women’s rights.
Therefore, I have to remain in the Pro-Choice camp also. It just makes me sad to think about.
No. I am saying that I, personally, would rather have been aborted than unwanted or the victim of behavior-induced birth defects. I can’t speak for you.
In my religious views, after all, death is almost literally meaningless unless I’ve made moral choices in that lifetime prior to death–it might help to know you’re arguing this with a Zen Buddhist.
Because a fetus damaged by its mother’s drug intake didn’t make a choice to be born in a damaged and crippled state, and the mother’s moral right to choose to abort (which grows out of her right to bodily autonomy) overrules the fetus’ non-existent “right” to life supported wholly by another’s biological processes.
Once someone is a person that can make their own decisions, they can make their own decisions.
I have made no such arguement. I am merely saying I would consider all those fates I listed to be “worse than death”.
I’m someone who believes it’s a baby and a person from conception, but remain pro-choice. For me it’s a simple “lesser of two evils” argument.
If abortion is made illegal, sure you might save some of the innocent babies, but not nearly all. And many if not most of those babies will be born into a life of poverty, neglect, and abuse. Plus you’ll have women, including many teenage girls going for back-alley abortions which could kill them or at best make them infertile.
Legal abortion allows those same women to receive safe abortions performed by qualified doctors, so almost entirely eliminates that problem. Many babies are spared a horrible life. And the ones who are killed are not aware of it and will feel very little pain, if at all.
Is it immoral to kill a person? Yes. Is it immoral to kill a person still living in a woman’s uterus? Yes. But it’s better than the alternatives.
The only place I get fuzzy on this issue is the question of when in the babies development to draw the line. One week after conception? No problem. One week before delivery? No way.