While I agree with this in principle… what happens when we can keep fetuses alive after just three months? Same rules?
My intuitions say I like the number line you drew. I’m not sure the defense (one I want to use too) works in the long term, however. Is there a nuance I’m missing?
I think abortions should be legal until the kid is 18. If you wake up and notice your kid is a drug using miscreant that will be nothing but a burden to society and you want to take a mulligan, thats fine with me.
First off souls don’t exist. Please cite some scientific evidence if you believe contrary.
Lekatt, don’t bother posting.
As the fetus is a marvelously advanced animal like the rest of us, it gets rights when it starts to think and experience the universe and is an individual. A clump of tissue with an undeveloped brain is no more worthy of person-hood than a sea cucumber.
Well, I’m not him, but it works for me. I see no reason why, once preemie care can handle it, adoptive parents couldn’t choose to adopt a micropreemie and pay for its incubation outside the womb. I’m not sure I want to fund mandatory incubation of all unwanted fetuses, but I’m up for it as another pregnancy option.
As far as I’m concerned, though, *unassisted viability (assessed individually for each woman) should remain the cutoff for making abortion illegal. If a human can’t live without machines breathing for it, it’s not alive in a meaningful sense of the word, IMHO. It’s nice when it can be done, but it’s not ethically required.
*Exceptions made for child and adult patients who have already passed viability.
More precisely, pro-lifers tend to talk about when the life of a human being begins. Pro-choicers tend to inject the “personhood” argument, but that’s because they choose to draw a distinction between the two. (For my part, I would ask “What’s the difference, and is it rooted in an accepted definition of personhood – one that wasn’t selected in order to justify abortion?”)
I can see all of the arguments on the side of pro-choice. And I tend to agree with them, if not hesitantly. But what always gets me, in the end, is the termination of a human potential. No matter the extenuating circumstances, internally I struggle with only that. I can break this down logically, and analyze both sides of the argument, and what keeps popping into my mind, is feeling bad for the life that started, and was terminated. The human there was initiated. Forget the “definition of life”, we’re talking fringe-ethics here. We all know a human begins when an egg has been fertilized. From that point on, it has the very likely potential of becoming somebody, someday… and that’s where I struggle. We’d all be pro-life while in the womb, wouldn’t we?
Ah, but a fetus that is legally determined to be of abortable age…is alive. They can move, have a heartbeat, etc.
I have been a party to a couple abortions with ex-girlfriends and I am still awash in uncertainty and guilt about it. Maybe this stems from the fact that I am now a married father of three, and feel like karma is going to strike me down as a result of my misdeeds.
This argument is a difficult one. Abortion does stop a beating heart…but is that beating heart surrounded by rapidly forming cells a person?
I mean, shit, you could say that a newbown isn’t really a person, if you use brain development and personality as a qualifier. Why can’t we just bash their soft skulls against a wall immediately after birth? What’s the difference between doing that and aborting a first-trimester fetus?
Do aborted fetuses feel pain when aborted?
Man this issue is tough and oogy.
And as the “pro-lifers” tend to demonstrate in their other attitudes, that’s because they generally don’t actually care about people. They don’t even care about life quite often, thus the quotes; just forcing women to go through pregnancy, even if ( or especially if ) it hurts or kills them.
Of course. As I pointed out, we use the same definition to determine if someone is legally dead, for purposes such as organ transplants. It’s the “pro-lifers” who are using a tailored definition of life. A definition that denies the importance of everything that makes a human life more important than an equal mass of bacteria.
Perhaps you’re right about the hard-core “pro-lifers” allowing no exception on the issue when it comes to hurting or killing the mother and that’s one of the reasons why it should be kept legal, but to have an abortion for convenience sake seems a little shaky to me, ethically.
When someone is brain-dead, they are kept alive artificially using machines, and the hope of a recovery in that case is usually severely low. With an in-utero life, the fetus isn’t being kept alive via some artificial means, but a natural process linked to the mother. Also, the fetus has a usually high expectancy for life (obviously), and to claim these two scenarios are anything at all alike, is at best, only in the superficial.
Again, forget about the definition of life and when it begins in earnest in a human. It’s inconsequential. The reality is, is that a life (just as real as yours or mine) has been started. Who’s call is it to kill it?
Wait a minute. You say forget about the definition of life and in the next sentence you define it. You can’t have your cake and deny everyone else’s cake. Your reality isn’t necessarily *the *reality.
As for the question of abortion. Leave it to the incubator to decide. 'Nuff said.
Sorry, I was talking about the definition of when a life begins. In the sentence you’re pointing to, I said a life was started. I couldn’t care less what definition me or anyone else might use in argument for abortion, since it doesn’t matter when you respect that the zygote is a potential human being.
And it’s not 'nuff said. Why wouldn’t you want to explain your reasoning (or feelings) as to why the descision only rests with the mother?
Since this question could easily have been directed at me, I guess I’ll just jump in with a reply. The decision rests only with the mother because she is (by a huge margin) the person most affected.
Trying to pinpoint exactly when someone can be defined as a person is silly, and I don’t see the bearing it has on the discussion. You don’t have the right to stab a brain-dead person to death, or to smother a 3 day old baby, or damage a fetus (unless the mother wants it done).
I don’t really care about the abortion issue very much, but the semantic posturing people do to try and make their position correct by definition is just annoying. Either you’re okay with someone having the right to end a human’s life, or you’re not. Don’t try to define your way out of having to confront that reality. A baby isn’t an inhuman fetus with no rights the day before it’s born, and a human deserving of respect and legal protection the next.
Well, we seem to be willing to draw a difference between us and other animals on a continuum in terms of sapience (Buddhists excluded). Most people - including pro-lifers - aren’t vegetarian, for example. We tend to treat apes and dolphins reasonably better than we do bugs. I suppose I would ask a question back; if we’re willing to treat living beings in terms of what rights we bestow upon them by taking sentience/sapience as our measuring bar, why should human life be any different?
I don’t know whether you would accept my definition of personhood or not, but I don’t believe it was especially selected in order that it would make abortion ok. I don’t believe a braindead human is a person, either, thought in their case they once were instead of will be. I wouldn’t consider a heart kept alive in a box a person, either. I would turn the question back again and ask you whether *your * definition of what is a human being is rooted in an accepted definition, or one that was selected in order to justify the existence of the soul?
One could argue the fetus will be effected as much, if not more. To trivialize the rights of a life (potential or otherwise) that has been initiated due to whatever decision brought the mother there in the first place, gives me the heebee-jeebees.
You seem to be saying “Forget about your definition. My definition is the correct one, so accept it, and now answer my question.” The difference isn’t inconsequential merely because you say it is; others may have an opinion on that.
Anyway, to take up your situation; I don’t believe that there are any definitions of life that apply to a fertilised egg that would not also apply to a sperm and an egg (beyond the “inevitably it will become a person” argument which I don’t agree with), and so I would say if you consider that a life has started then not only those two lives have been ended, but the lives of all the other sperm have, too. If a fertilised egg, on the moment of conception, is a life, then I would say anything other than artificial insemination done to limit the amount of dead sperm/eggs is morally wrong.
I would add that I am sure you have taken on the burden of killing life before, should you have ever swatted a fly. I’m sure you consider that fertilised egg very different from a fly - and as such merely saying the operative term is “life” doesn’t really work. Many things live that we take on the responsibility of killing. There must be some other part of your definition beyond “life” that’s at play here.