If “killing your wife” conflicts with a man’s personal morals, then don’t do it, but don’t try to force those moral beliefs on everyone else through legislation.
See why that doesn’t work?
The two expressions are stupid because the issue is multi-faceted, as this thread demonstrates. I would say that very few people seem to fall into extreme on either end of the spectrum (but those who are, like to announce it with trumpets). Most people seem to be somewhat “Pro-Life-ish with Pro-Choice leanings,” or vice versa.
There’s a guy who believes that abortion should only be allowed if conception occurred under his specific list of circumstances, or if the woman’s health falls under his list of appropriate conditions, and that the man who impregnated the woman in question meets a specific criteria. His opinion can only accurately be described as “Steve’s opinion.”
They are bad expressions, but it seems we need more of them.
Hate to burst your bubble, but no, it hasn’t. If the analogy has any value, then womb+fetus must be comparable to spaceship+toddler. This isn’t about a “two year-old kid”, it’s about the compound situation “two year-old kid on a spaceship”. Without that qualifier, the analogy says nothing, let alone proves anything.
Hilarious. “Just because” ? I guess a bus is a useful machine and doesn’t deserve to be thought of otherwise just because its parking brake failed and it’s now careening through a crowded schoolyard. You’re casually dismissive of the circumstances, just wishing them away as though that solves something.
If you want a failed analogy, pretend the kid sneaked into my car instead of my spaceship. Under these conditions, I can leave the car and not risk instant death, my air supply is effectively infinite, and I can steer the car at will and (presumably) I’m not too far removed from some outpost of authority (police station, fire station, hospital) where I can drop the kid off or a phone booth where I can call for assistance or a food store where I can resupply. Compare that to a spaceship, where me and Kid Stowaway could be isolated for months, on limited supplies, with no-one likely able to come to our aid, where I might have to suffer serious personal hardship and privation to keep the kid alive, or I might just not like kids and being forced to live with one will be irritating.
Without any of the elements that make a spaceship a spaceship, I guess it’s not really a spaceship, is it?
Please allow me to be especially clear - I don’t care if the fetus is human. I don’t care if someone wants to call it a “person”. I wouldn’t care if some medical test could demonstrate the fetus was sentient and fully aware of its circumstances. It’s inside of a woman and she wants it out. As far as I’m concerned, that’s sufficient.
Oh, I knew that long ago. Rest assured, though, if you have a daughter who wants an abortion, she’ll get my support even if she doesn’t have yours. That, I feel, is the humane thing to do. That’s how humans should be treated - with respect for their rights to make their own decisions. As with the earlier “subhuman”, if you thought your finger-wagging and tongue-clucking would make me forget what’s at stake, you were grossly mistaken.
If the man’s wife is physically inside his body, umbilically attached, and he wants her out, I’d say it works fine.
Which as pointed out, has zero connection to abortion.
If you are anti-abortion then that’s what you are doing. Claiming otherwise is dishonest.
A false and blatantly dishonest comparison; what I expect from the anti-abortionists. No one suffers if you pet puppies or eat cheese sticks; forbidding abortion creates immense suffering and death. Which, when all is said and done, is the whole point.
No, it’s an appeal to reality. There are real women who will undergo real suffering in that case. The “children” that the anti-abortion movement rants about are imaginary, and cannot suffer.
No, it doesn’t. A fetus is what it is, whether you label it as human, animal, vegetable or mineral. If a fetus is declared human that doesn’t make it one bit more deserving of rights; it just means that “human” is no longer an ethically important category.
Cite, please? Every single pro-life organization that I know (NRLC, Focus on the Family, and so forth) makes an exception for those rare situations where the mother’s life is placed in serious danger. They consistently argue that the physician should make every effort to save both the mother and the unborn, and that abortion should only be used as a last resort.
Now, it’s possible that you’ll find some pro-lifers who’ll say that abortion should not be allowed even to save a mother’s life. By the same token though, you’ll find pro-choicers who believe that mothers have the right to kill their children even after they have been born. (Remember Peter Singer?) Citing these rare and extreme individuals ultimately proves nothing, unless one chooses to let extreme pro-choicers characterize the pro-choice stance as well.
Why are you giving “good reasons” to kill the kid? I thought you don’t need them.
That’s more like it.
I get this. I understand your position. Even if the fetus is demonstrated to be sentient and fully aware of its circumstances, you would be OK with disposing it for any reason whatsoever.
I’m not sure everyone on the pro-choice side agrees with you, if the fetus is demonstrated to be sentient and fully aware of its circumstances. It would be interesting to find out what percent of people have this opinion.
Really? So if a two-year-old wanders across your lawn, you’d feel justfied in blasting him to the sidewalk with your Glock? After all, it’s your lawn and all.
Well, you have an honest face, so I’ll take your word for it. Anybody else who’d take this position–a toddler who inconveniences me by having the wrong-colored eyes can be dispensed with–well, I’d assume that person was so strenuously trying to demonstrate the strength and consistency of his position that he had inadvertently stumbled across the border into ridiculous-land.
What’s ‘serious’ danger and at what point is a doctor allowed to save only the mother’s life?
Abortion is too common to even need analogies or hypotheticals. You know someone who’s had an abortion. A friend, a girlfriend, your mother, your aunt. Forget a kid on a spaceship-- how about your little sister in her senior year of high school?
Careful Bryan. You’re going to have trouble defending your position unless your god of choice told you it is the correct one. Why not try saving sperm and menstrual tissue instead?
I’m not anti-abortion.
First, I don’t know when fetuses become sentient and aware of their environment.
That to me would make a difference, but as it stands, we don’t know, so I can’t say.
Second, I’m just trying to figure out the limits of the arguments used by both sides. I have always felt that the “it’s my body and I can do whatever I want with it, without having to give any reason, under any circumstances”, was wrong (because, as they say, every rule should have an exception). But several arguments on the pro-life side are also wrong.
Third, I don’t think the world we live in is a particularly great place to be, and if you add in the extra problems a kid will face if they are brought up in difficult situations such as those faced by many women who want an abortion, then maybe not being born is best.
Fourth, no matter what we say here on this board, if you want to have 10 abortions per year, knock yourself out. Given the current indeterminate status of the sentientness of a fetus, I don’t care.
The point is whether it is sentient or not, not whether you call it ‘human’ or ‘cabbage’.
Is this an appeal to emotion? I thought only those “anti-abortionists” used that.
I don’t. I’m just pointing that saying “just because” the kid is on a spaceship is laughable, as though the circumstance deserved little more than a shrug and a footnote. Because the kid is on a spaceship (and because the fetus is in someone’s uterus), he doesn’t get the same protection afforded kids that are not on spaceships. If the spaceship aspect is irrelevant, that it was a useless analogy from the start.
Sure. After all, a burglar that breaks into someone’s house is sentient and fully aware and yet I respect the right of the resident to expel that burglar, possibly by calling in professionals to aid in the extraction. If the burgler dies as a result, that’s a shame, but it’s secondary to the resident’s right to be safe in her home. The only reason she needs is that she wants the burglar to not be in her home without her consent. It doesn’t matter if she knows the guy, or left her door unlocked, or had him over as a guest on a previous occasion. He’s in, she wants him out, her house, her decision.
It wouldn’t matter if it gave them ulcers and convinced them they will eventually burn in Hell, so long as they agree to keep abortion legal. I do hope, though, the my fellow pro-choicers are made of sterner stuff and can resist blatant appeals to emotion. Fortunately, the modern proto-pro-choice pioneers who recognized the need for safe legal abortion in the early part of the 20th century had more guts than you imply they had a right to.
Well, it would have to be an ugly kid…
Ahem, I never said or implied “lawn”. I only said “spaceship”. Unless you think I have a lawn on my spaceship, Silent Running-style, your point is irrelevant and a blatant strawman.
For one thing, in ectopic pregnancies, the embry has no chance of survival. In such situations, the physician would be perfectly justified in performing an abortion. This is a classic example that is frequently cited by pro-life authorities (e.g. Dr. John Willke). Similarly, if the fetus is too young to be viable (that is, if it has no chance of survival without the mother), then the doctor would be justified in saving the mother’s life instead.
It sounds to me like you’re asking me to provide an exhaustive list of such situations, though. No dice; I’m not falling into that trap. We could debate the fine points of hypothetical situations all day long (e.g. what if the mother’s uterus has been trauamatized by a bullethole, and how badly traumatized does it have to be?), but that’s just dodging the question. As I said, physicians have to exercise their best judgments. Are there certain gray, hypothetical scenarios in which such judgments are difficult? Certainly, but that doesn’t absolve them of the need to save both mother and child, if at all possible.
Remember, Siege specifically said that there are pro-lifers who believe that women should die rather than have an abortion, even when their life is at stake. I have yet to see any justification for that claim, and it violates the stance of every single pro-life organization that I know. You can ask “When is it necdessary to save the mother’s life?!?!!?!?” until you’re blue in the face, but that doesn’t change their stance, nor does it justify Seige’s claim.
Out of curiosity, does the physician have a greater responsibility to the mother or the fetus, or neither? If he has to choose one to give preferential treatment to at the expense of the other, who should his first choice be?
You seem to have a funny definition of “dishonesty.” In any case, it’s no more “dishonest” than your side equating abortion to having a wart removed:
No, I am merely trying to point out that I’m getting frustrated by discussions mired in hypotheticals when everyone here knows someone who’s had an abortion. I understand analogies are needed for debate, but too often I see news items or documentaries in which actual women are notably absent. This isn’t something that happens to ‘other people,’ it is a choice millions of women have made and will make. Obviously they won’t all readily admit to it, but the idea that only cold or selfish women make the decision to have an abortion ‘of convenience’ means an awful lot of women are cold and selfish.
But you’d still have a situation in which the woman is confronted with someone who will ultimately decide at what point her life is worth saving (or worth saving more than the potential yet unwanted child). God forbid, hippocratic oath aside, she get a particularly religious doctor, the type who won’t dispense EC, who believes saving anf baptizing the baby is priority number one. If Bryan is indeed from Montreal, Quebec, then he may have learned that this is precisely why certain Catholic women chose to give birth at the Jewish General Hospital a few decades ago.
Oh, and as for pro-lifers who still think women should stay pregnant and give birth even if it puts their life in danger (regardless of the fact that it is automatically riskier than abortion)… you know Mitt Romney
Der Trihs doesn’t speak for my side.
And what’s “funny” about calling ManiacMan’s strawman characterization: “So! I know let’s not even give the kid a chance! Let’s just KILL IT!” dishonest. You really don’t think it’s dishonest to substitute “killing a kid” for “having an abortion”?
I don’t actually know what Catholic woman had to go through, being Jewish.
[sub]And I was born at Lachine General. 
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