Yes. Because if you accept that sort of birth control, then you have no logical rationale for opposing, say, the “morning-after” pill, which also works by producing a uterine environment hostile to implantation (in addition to preventing ovulation and fertilization, just as regular birth-control pills do).
:dubious: So you’re willing to condone occasional murder of human beings as long as there was a good-faith effort to prevent human beings from being there in the first place?
The problem with your argument is that you almost certainly wouldn’t consider such a compromise acceptable in the case of actual born human beings. You would not say, for example, that it’s okay for a driver to deliberately run over a toddler in the street as long as there was a fairly effective sidewalk barrier that prevented most toddlers from getting into the street.
If a fertilized egg is a fully human person, then you can’t logically condone the killing of fertilized eggs any more than you would condone the killing of any other fully human persons. Your willingness to accept a double standard on this issue is an indication that deep down you don’t actually regard fertilized eggs as fully equivalent to human persons, although you may want to believe you do.
If by “both” you mean “both individually”, where either parent is allowed to relinquish rights and responsibilities irrespective of what the other parent wants, then yes, IMO that fixes the problem I had with your original argument.
(It probably creates a bigger problem for society in terms of providing adequate support to children unwanted by their biological parents, but that’s another issue.)
I understand what you are saying. What I am saying is that is not ideal for an unwanted child. Not everyone who *can *be a parent, *should *be a parent, least of all someone who doesn’t *want *to be a parent. It doesn’t seem fair to the child to saddle them with one or two parents who don’t want them. We already have safe haven laws that permit parents to anonymously drop off newly born infants in a safe place to prevent infanticide. If a child cannot be adopted and the parent is known, the state often requires parents to remain financially obligated to the child to relieve the burden on the taxpayer. But why relieve the burden of the taxpayer when the alternative is abortion.
A pregnant woman with severe financial instability, might consider abortion be a valid reason solution to the avoid the protracted and considerable financial expense of a child. Adoption is an option, but not a requirement. If the state, and by extension society, values that life and decides that financial instability is not a moral reason to abort, it should be ready to accept financial support of the resulting child.
So what if a person wants to keep a child but can’t afford to because the other parent has decided to “abort” their responsibilities?
Abortion rights are not founded on the right to not be a parent. That’s obscene–which is why we don’t have “abortion” for men. Abortion rights are founded on bodily autonomy.
Again, make clear your point. How illegal. Let’s suppose we make you, nate, dictator for life, and you have absolute power to decide what is illegal and what isn’t, and what punishment is to be carried out.
How would you punish a women who sought out and got a back alley abortion?
How would you punish a doctor who provided that abortion?
Would you allow your police forces to investigate cases where they detected, through surveillance of some sort, that a woman was pregnant, and then later was found to not be pregnant without giving birth?
For example, if she went to a doctor, that doctor noted in her file that she was pregnant, then after 9 months passed, an automated script noted that no birth was recorded. Would cops be authorized to investigate what happened?
Would the blood of women miscarrying at a hospital be checked for abortion drugs?
Pro-life people generally answer “yes” and “lots and lots of prison time or execution” to all the above questions.
Assuming you say yes, your weak feeling that a blastocyst is a person is your justification for all this, right? Nothing concrete, just a feeling that deciding one is a person is “more logically consistent”.
So your idea is to gradually give the fetus increasing human rights, to where at some point it would be illegal to elect to abort (w/ medical exceptions). So at some point during this gestation the fetus gains the right to live regardless of the mother’s wishes. You can’t really pin this point down, but mention viability outside the womb. But this varies from fetus to fetus and is completely dependent on contemporary medical technology, not to mention it opens up the illogical scenario of being able to kill the fetus one day and not the next. At least my answer to when a human gains personhood doesn’t have these problems.
Right, in order to implement it in a legally consistent way we’d have to draw an arbitrary line to define some kind of theoretical “viability boundary” that wouldn’t accurately describe the individual variation among pregnancies. Which is in fact what most abortion-rights legislation does, which I think is a reasonable compromise.
Sure, it’s arbitrary and doesn’t properly represent the science of human development, as I’ve been saying all along. But that’s because biology is inherently messy like that.
The trouble is that your answer has even more glaring logical inconsistencies that you’ve apparently chosen to ignore. Are you ever going to address those, by the way? For starters, the inconsistency of your accepting that sometimes it’s okay to kill a fertilized egg (e.g., with a birth control pill) and sometimes not (e.g., with a “morning-after” pill that uses exactly the same chemical mechanisms as a birth control pill)?
In my dictatorship, elective abortion would be illegal except with a medical exemption from a doctor. Investigations into miscarriages would be incredibly rare. Doctors performing the abortions without bona fide exemptions may be prosecuted (for example, a doctor approving and performing several abortions a day on the 1st visit from the patients would probably be ripe for investigation/prosecution/jail time).
Really? Because a dictator who genuinely believed that fetuses were equivalent to fully human persons would insist on investigating any unexplained death among them.
If a toddler dies in an apparent accident, for example, you bet your boots the police investigate that death. You don’t think a dead embryo or fetus is important enough to deserve the same consideration as an individual?
See, nate, the problem a lot of posters are having with your positions here isn’t that we object to your rather woolly but apparently well-intentioned desire to protect human life. It’s that your positions are so inconsistently and illogically formulated that you keep tripping over your self-contradictions at every step.
You are enjoying the self-righteous feeling of believing that you have a logical and humane stance on human personhood, while glossing over all the built-in assumptions that contradict what you claim to believe.
Except that something like 1/4 of all pregnancies end in some sort of miscarriage. Since deaths of post-birth children is several orders of magnitude lower than that, a different threshold for when an investigation should ensue is neither unreasonable nor illogical.
I don’t understand why you are so hung up on this. We make compromises because well, the perfect is the enemy of the good. Until we figure out a flawless way of preventing fertilization, a method with flaws would be used because it is a step in the right direction. I maintain that fertilization is the most logical beginning to human life, so a birth control that, when effective at preventing pregnancy, prevents 99% of fertilizations and the other 1% is prevented from implantation (I don’t know the actual statistics, just that the later case is “rare”), it is still far superior to the alternative of aborting all. Ideally, we would eventually have methods that prevent fertilization 100% of the time, but until we do, we go with the best we have. I don’t understand the “got cha!” you seem to be implying.
I don’t think a dead fetus warrants the investigation of a dead toddler, for practical reasons. At least with today’s technology it would be nearly impossible to prove the mother did not naturally miscarry, and in my world this would be the assumption except in edge cases where the mother admits to killing the fetus.
Why? People in their eighties, for example, die at a much higher rate than people in their twenties. But when an 80-year-old dies of unknown causes, it still gets investigated.
Your objection is simply another way of saying that it’s impractical to treat embryos and fetuses as fully human persons because they are so often undetectable and ephemeral. I couldn’t agree more. Which is why we shouldn’t disingenuously bestow on them some kind of formal status as fully human persons and then disregard aspects of their human rights that are inconvenient to deal with.
But we don’t make compromises on actual murder. If somebody proposed that drivers should be allowed to run down children in the street as long as we had a highly effective system for keeping children out of the street in the first place, nobody would accept such a compromise.
But you are stubbornly unwilling to consistently follow through on treating the human rights of a fertilized egg as genuinely equal to the human rights of a fully human person.
When we’re talking about actual human persons, we don’t try to argue that murdering one person should be acceptable and legal because at least it’s better than murdering a hundred people.
Then you shouldn’t be basing your arguments on the claim that you consider a fetus to be equivalent in personhood to a toddler, because clearly you don’t.
No, they don’t. There is no taking over a second body. There is simply removing it from the first body. Eviction and “taking over” are not the same action. No one is going inside the baby to make its body do something it would ordinarily not do. It is simply being forcibly removed, just like evicting someone from a house.
You also make the mistake of assuming personhood alone determines value. I can very much argue that the fetus is a person, but the mother, having had actual experiences and an ability to feel, is a more valuable person. I can argue there is less harm in letting the fetus person die than to require the mother person to go through the pain of pregnancy. (This is especially convincing when the mother would have health problems and might die herself.)
The main issue is that, for atheism to argue a pro-life stance, it must appeal to something outside the rational world. It must assert a value to human life that must come from somewhere besides mere rationality. It must come from a belief system. And then it’s hardly an “atheist” argument. It’s an argument based on that belief system.
But that is also true of a pro-choice stance, really. No pro-choice stance is atheistic, either. There is nothing in atheism that requires one way or the other. Why would not believing in God obligate you to have a particular opinion on abortion?
In that regard, a stance an atheist could make is that abortion is wrong because some alien told them so. Heck, the alien could be an angel, as long as the angel exists without a god.
This is getting old. You are just using hyperbole and strange analogies to represent my arguments. You are failing to accept practicalities. Of course we shouldn’t be acceptable to 1 murder, but there is currently no alternative for this type of birth control. This is not perfect solution, but a minimization of harm with today’s technology. Again, I don’t understand why you are so hung up on this.
You want me to say that human intervention leading to the failure of a fertilized egg to implant should result in charges of murder, but I’m sorry, that’s just not my stance. Now you’ll say, “you don’t believe they actually have human rights”. And I’ll say they do, but due to impracticalities of enforcement, charges akin to murder would rarely, if ever, be brought. And you’ll say, “birth control pills sometimes fail at prevention of fertilization but then will prevent implantation, and we know this happens, so why is that not murder?” And I say well it is but it should be used anyway as it’s better than the alternative because it practically minimizes abortions because of the rare failure rate. So let us agree to disagree.
The OP wanted to hear the opinion of a pro-life atheist so I chimed in. I’m not here to try to convince anyone, just to explain my beliefs.
48 point type “Huh?” How does stressing the importance of the mother’s right to defend her body, even at the cost of harming the fetus, possibly equate to “abortion should not be allowed?”
Think about it: does anybody, at all, support the right of the fetus to “act against” the mother’s body? Has anybody actually come out in favor of fetal matricide?
I’ve seen several people refer to viability as one possible point of person-hood, and I tend to lean that way myself. But… there is still the issue of how is that done? If a mother with limited funds decides to remove a fetus, after the point of viability, who is going to pay for it? Who is going to support that child? Who will pay the mother’s medical bills? A newborn that early is going to be very expensive to care for. Preemies require lots of specialized medical care, and lots of care once they get home. Are we, the society, willing to take over those costs? It’s all well and good to have societal ethics boundaries, but unless we the people are willing to step up and take on the responsibility of care, those boundaries are meaningless.
So anyone that declares themselves Pro-life better have a plan in place for how to take care of that life. A strict pro-life stance does more than remove a woman’s control over her body, it adds a whole new set of responsibilities, for at least the next 18 years. And I have yet to see a pro-life supporter that has stated that they are willing to adopt a child and take on that responsibility themselves. There may be a few, but the numbers aren’t large.
Anyone who is not in favor of infanticide better be prepared to take care of that life. A strict can’t-kill-toddlers stance adds a whole new set of responsibilities, at least for the remainder of the child’s life, until he is 18. I have yet to see someone who is against infanticide willing to adopt a child and take on the responsibility themselves. There may be a few, but the numbers aren’t large.
IOW, being “against killing” doesn’t mean you need to personally support the person* who wasn’t killed.
*I don’t think a pre-viable fetus is a person, but pro-lifers do, and their stance is not objectively wrong.
nate, I appreciate your participation in the thread, but I do think that **Kimstu **has made a good argument that illustrates your own inconsistencies in your position. What I wanted was not just your opinion, but debate. I wish you would respond to those inconsistencies without accusing other debaters of using hyperbole. I wish you would respond to mine as well. Here’s a good example:
Do you feel this line drawn at birth is any different than your line drawn at fertilization? At least I’m consistent. My basis for supporting pro-choice is respecting a woman’s bodily integrity. I’m consistent in that I also don’t support mandatory blood/organ/tissue donations. There is no point in time that I feel that any person, while living, should be forced to use their body to benefit others. Not parents, not strangers. Not ever.
You have not addressed bodily integrity which is the basis of this post and is addressed in the editorial I linked to. Did you read it? Instead, you started out by arguing the beginning of life (then personhood), but you’ve failed to make any logical basis for why that should supersede bodily integrity and the inconsistencies of your position only serve to illustrate why it shouldn’t.
Your position, if I understand you correctly, is that humans are considered persons at fertilization and it is wrong to kill people, which includes fertilized zygotes. However, you are okay with the killing of them in certain circumstances:
A person can be killed if its mother is suffering (in what way you have yet to specify) as a result of rape. But you also stated that the conception doesn’t matter, which I have pointed out is contradictory. You have yet to address this contradiction. Also, does this right to murder extend to any point in the pregnancy or after the pregnancy if she is still suffering from the rape? If not, why? At what point does the offspring attain some irrevocable right to life no matter the event of conception or condition of its mother? And why then?
You are okay with the death of a zygote by creating a hostile environment which prevents implantation in some circumstances, e.g. test tube, hormonal birth control, IUD, but not in others, e.g. the morning after pill. Why? Do the personhood rights cease to matter for that zygote, but not for others?
Further, due to impracticality of enforcing such a law, you suggest that there is no reason to investigate miscarriages as to whether they fall within those rules, unless the woman admits to intentionally aborting her pregnancy. What is the point of the law there is no intention of enforcing? You have already admitted this is a problem with your position and that you have no idea how society should deal with an unenforceable law, yet it doesn’t cause you to re-evaluate your position. You seem a lot more invested in it than you initially indicated in your first post. It’s ironic considering you also said this:
But you don’t think it’s lazy to write laws that are unenforceable and you are so invested in the personhood of fertilized eggs that you are willing to hand-wave away the murders society has no way of prosecuting.
You are okay with elective abortion with a medical exemption from a doctor. What type of medical conditions warrant revoking a fetal/zygotic person’s right to life? Is it restricted to conditions in which the pregnant woman may die, in which case you are, for some reason, valuing her life over that of the zygote/fetus? Does the medical justification for abortion include non-fatal illness that may/may not lead temporary or permanent health issues/changes? How about mental health issues, including anxiety or severe/chronic depression with its corresponding behavioral/physical symptoms?
I am the OP and I still have questions with regard to your position. Help me understand.
Then that’s where we as a society step in and ensure that every wanted child is provided with the absolute basic necessities to survive and thrive because not only does that child benefit, we as a society benefits from healthy, educated children who grow up to become healthy, well-adjusted and productive adults.
I agree. But I can’t think of another way to equalize the biological fact that women are the ultimate arbiters of parenthood. If a woman becomes pregnant and doesn’t want to have offspring, she rightfully has the option to abort the pregnancy and eliminate the possibility of parental rights and responsibilities. If a man impregnates a woman and doesn’t want offspring, he has no practical means to prevent it. He cannot force the woman to obtain an abortion and, while he may relinquish his custodial rights, he cannot give up his financial responsibilities (always financial) if the mother decides to raise the child. He has no practical way of eliminating the potential of parenthood, whether he wants it or not. I have a problem with that. I feel he should have options too, and while obviously they can’t be the same as hers, they should ultimately have the same result: that one can have sex and reject parenthood.