(Artificial teat sold separately. Batteries not included.)
Not artificial, but gestational surrogacy is an absolutely viable option.
That’s my point - all the other stuff, about physiology or whatever, is a smokescreen. It boils down to answers to two questions:
Is the early-term foetus a person/alive (late term abortions being pretty much off the table, I gather)?
Could we abort it even if it was?
It’s the first question that this thread is supposed to be about, if a little confusedly with all that “life” terminology misunderstanding.
Me, I think the foetus is alive, yeah. It’s also … person-ish. Not a full person, but not just a clump of cells after the first couple days, either. So I don’t disagree there.
None of that matters to my stance on abortion, which is entirely shaped by my answering question 2 in the affirmative.
Oh. Alright, then. It has a fully functional (barring any congenital defects) heart after 8 weeks, although still entirely dependent on the mother, so “alive” is a nebulous term. Viability is probably a better goal to aim for, and that’s generally around 28-30 weeks. Higher brain functions (what makes you you) are at around 24-26 weeks. So…no, not really a person after “a couple days.”
Vegetables are alive but a in a meaningful sense humans are only humans once they have sentience.
Until you have sentience you are no more then biological clockwork,as human as a fruit fly.
Potentially human yes,actually human no.
If we followed the anti abortionists(sorry but if you happily murder people to promote your beliefs then you are not pro life but pro death) facile arguments then we would be running round trying to save the "lives"of the millions of spent sperm and the shed eggs every month.
Its a pity that the AAs dont spend a little of all that wasted energy on helping those who are actually alive rather then on some dream world version of humanity.
That’s a pretty wide brush you’re painting with there. I’m gonna go out on a limb here and say that the vast majority of anti-abortionists do not “happily murder people” to promote their beliefs. The fact that some do does not at all indicate that those who share their beliefs condone it.
ETA: Let’s at least try to be respectful to those with whom we disagree.
All, probably not. A great many, certainly. I recall reading how Eric Rudolph the anti-abortion bomber evaded custody for a long time because he was hidden by sympathizers.
To be blunt about it, the “pro-life” side is evil. Tyrants who want to humiliate, torment and kill women, on the moral level of the KKK. It’s to be expected that many will support violence, given the nature of their philosophy.
That’s a nice wide brush too, you know.
When I was involved in the pro-life movement 20 years ago (and for god’s sake don’t plow into me now, I’ve been trying to get off their mailing lists for 15 years)…the people I knew did not resemble this strawman you’re propping up. Whatever we were, we were not wanting to humiliate, torment, or kill women. Whatever the leaders may have privately discussed, the rank and file were NOT on the moral level of the KKK. When I heard Shelley Shannon had shot that fellow Tiller in Kansas City, it hit me physically, identically to the way I felt when my grandfather died. I argued with Advocates for Life then - I’d worked for them for a while - and parted ways most permanently when they changed the tune they had ALWAYS emphasized, from ‘No political actions, no violence’ to ‘we always knew it would go this way, we just weren’t ready yet’.
The more extreme the movement became, the more the ordinary folks dropped out. It didn’t mean they didn’t still believe that women ought to have more real choices than abortion - or working to help provide them - it just meant they no longer would associate themselves with the extremists.
If you want to tar some of the present leaders of the movement? I’ll stand next to you holding a brush. But you cannot tar everyone the same, unless you can climb inside their heads and see their motivations.
I can’t, which is why I can only judge them by their actions, here and elsewhere. And those actions have always been focused much more on hurting women than on anything else, and show no signs of any scruples. I simply see no reason beyond the “pro-lifers” unsupported claims that they actually care about anyone’s life, or health for that matter.
:rolleyes: Whatever you do, DT, don’t change. Ever. You’re (checks forum) so darn cute!!!
I notice you very carefully avoided arguing with my position; empty mockery proves nothing.
I’ll argue with your position: most of the pro-life people people I know are pro-life because they were told to be, and they think that abortion kills babies because of their religious beliefs, and they think that that contraception exists only to promote promiscuity because they are told so, and because it’s not an obviously stupid idea if you don’t have many facts on hand and were yourself able to subsist on abstinence.
At best, this makes them misinformed and perhaps close-minded; at worst, it makes them sheep of their religion, peers, or leaders. (Not that you would ever agree that religion makes blind followers out of its adherents.) At no point does it even cross their mind to oppress women, or that their position might oppress women. So your assertions about them (as members of the “pro-life” side) are flatly incorrect. Further, I strongly suspect that most of the pro-lifers are much like this, and that only a vanishingly few of them (if any) are as you describe them.
I simply don’t believe that, given the way that the groups that oppose abortion, all over the world have always behaved.
The higher ups in the church…could be. But the average protester on the street? Not so much.
There’s a very nice man who wishes me good morning every Saturday that I’m in the clinic. I wish him good morning back, and he goes on to ask me to please find somewhere else to work. I don’t believe he’s interested in oppressing my patients or me so much as he honestly believes he’s trying to save something. I don’t agree with him, of course, but it seems more a question of concern for my “soul” than anything else. We rarely get the shoot-the-abortion-doctor, tell clients they’re going to hell type. It may be a regional thing.
This sounds like a belief that all the parts of a car want to drive down the road to the gas station, and not just the driver alone, given the way the whole car is going that way.
And with religion, it’s even more fun, because here you have organizations that often try to retain and perpetuate the instructions of past leaders. So quite easily those careful architects you postulate who sat down and carefully devised the scheme and crafted it to be as harmful to women as possible - if they ever existed at all, it’s quite likely that they’re all long-since dead. (Probably even before the invention of abortion came about.)
And of course, as an atheist, I’m quite comfortable with the idea of things evolving unintended attributes without the assistance of a sentient, deliberate designer. YMMV on that one though.