What moral contract?
So if you consent to have ten of your ovum fertilized in vitro, you should be obligated to have all ten of the embryos put into your uterus and carried to term?
Because it is really irrelevant how she got pregnant (and for that matter how she dresses, or what her boob size is), what matters is she accepted the possibility of creating the life.
I agree with the above, but does not negate that she may create a human life via her willing actions, and IMHO is responsible for it.
The obligation to deliver a human life that you created in a place where it is dependent on you for 9 months.
Going back to quantum effects I mentioned above, there is a theory where there is a cat in a sealed box, set up that some quantum probability effect will kill the cat or not. The theory is that cat is neither alive or dead till the door is opened, but actually rides a wave of life/death till the door is opened, then the wave collapses to one state or the other.
I see the act of life creation in the same way, but instead of a cat in the box, we have the potential of a person in that box. By agreeing to start the quantum box (sex/turkey basting) there is the potential of a human being in the box or not. I find it immoral to murder that person when you are the one who turned the quantum box on.
Now if you did not turn that box on, but your hand was forced to press the button I’d say you have no moral obligation to that person, and even though you can’t outright murder that person morally, you can tell that person to get out of your house.
You are responsible for the lives you willing create. The question would be more should the above procedure be undertaken at all, morally I’d say no.
Don’t you think that’s a bit of a weak definition? I mean, persons have a personality, don’t they?
I’m not trying to get you to rethink your position, I just think maybe you’ve chosen a word that carries unintended connotations.
But once again, in what circumstances does that moral contract come into existence? If the woman is impregnated during an alcoholic blackout at a house party, is she obligated to take the pregnancy to term? What if she does this every Saturday night?
Why do you pick conception as the point at which this potential begins? Test tubes of viable, unintroduced gametes on a lab bench have the potential to create a human being. A wayward housewife and the glint in the milkman’s eye have the potential too.
So you would deny life to Louise Brown and thousands (if not millions) of wanted children born to parents who really really wanted to be their parents and who were really really wanted children.
Let’s say two woman are both raped on the same day of their cycle. One of them goes to the hospital and gets the morning after pill treatment. The other doesn’t, gets pregnant, and has an abortion.
What;s the different end result of their different actions?
I just want to be very clear about something.
If I have sex, I’ve given one person consent–my husband.
Since I deny that anyone else can be involved, the only way you can claim that I’m giving consent to anyone else is by saying that I am unable to understand how I’m giving consent. Which would make me incapable of giving consent.
So, you’ve got two options: Either I am capable of giving consent, in which case I don’t and the embryo has zero rights to do things to me.
Or I am incapable of grasping what’s going on, in which case I’m not capable of giving consent which means that the embryo has zero right to do things to me.
In any case, “consent” is a red herring in my opinion. I don’t consent to be pregnant. Sorry.
She also accepted the possibility of catching syphilis. If she does, should she just live with it? Because syphilis is alive too, ya know.
You are IMHO denying the reality of the situation, you are potentially creating a person by the actions of you 2 and are morally obligated to him/her. You are giving consent for that 3rd person to come about, you may not want to admit this, but it what you are doing.
Who is Louise Brown and why do you give her special notation above all others in that situation? As I stated above in real world conditions I would have to leave it up to the parents, but I feel morally those parents are morally responsible for the deaths of the other ‘children’ that they murdered to get the one.
If conception did not happen, then the one taking the morning after pill has not caused the death of a human. The one who got the abortion took actions against the fetus that lead to it’s death, but those actions were within her rights. A argument can be made that she may have inflicted unneeded suffering on the fetus during the abortion, causing unnecessary pain.
I’ve gone back and forth on this issue many times and can see really 2 points where one can claim human life begins, one is conception, the other is the start of brain activity. I’m just pointing out a case that no abortion except in the case of rape is morally solid, I have based this on several premises, one such premise is life begins at conception.
Choice of the woman still exists here. She can chose to end this in which case nothing she has done would lead to the creation of a human. She can chose to sex with him, at which case she made a choice that have set into motion the potential of human life (she pressed the button on the quantum baby box)
Bolding added. Why did you put this in quotes? By the anti-abortion groups, the one cell zygote is an early child.
I mentioned Louise Brown to put a human face on in vitro. She was the first person conceived that way.
Why call a fetus ** it**? By the human being argument, shouldn’t you use “he or she”?
I don’t know. What sort of abortion is that analogous to?
Yup.
Only to the extent that nowadays any couple whose child dies of crib death could be judged guilty of murder. If women who miscarried got railroaded into jail, the problem wouldn’t be an abortion ban, it would be stupid DSS workers and judges.
Not conceiving the later kids isn’t the same as killing them. If life begins at conception, aborting the earlier kid is the same.
I’m pro-choice, by the way. I’m trying to point out that there can be a good reason for the rape exception. I just want people to be right for the right reasons, because the one thing I’m sure of in this debate is that if you think one side’s obviously right and the other’s just stupid, you haven’t thought about it enough.
Neither would you if someone snuck up behind you and knocked you out with a baseball bat. You’d still deserve to live, though. A fetus can be seen as a human being in an early stage of development. A tumor or a pint of blood can’t.
Atheists and religious alike agree that there’s something about people that makes each one of us precious, that gives every individual moral value and dignity. Call it “the soul,” call it “personhood,” we all believe it’s there. Reasonable people can disagree about when we get it, and that’s what most of the abortion debate is about.
I’ll let the Society of Music Lovers know you’re available for all their violinist life-support needs.
No. I am incapable of agreeing to consent to a figment of my imagination. I am incapable of doing that.
Just as a two year old is incapable of consenting to sex, I am incapable of consenting to any behavior by something that doesn’t exist.
You can’t have it both ways. You can’t say that I both don’t understand and am culpable. Either I understand and am culpable, or I don’t and I’m not.
I deny your explanation. I think it’s ridiculous, as if you claimed I was giving consent to a woodland sprite or the Loch Ness Monster. Sorry. Nope. Not gonna happen.
So, kanicbird, my question for the day for you is as follows:
To contrast with your hypothetical turkey-baster woman, let’s have a woman who’s been informed by reliable medical authority she is unable to conceive. For the sake of argument, let’s say she’s had a tubal ligation.
If, in the sort of fluke medical occurrence that makes doctors throw their hands to the heavens, she happens to conceive, how could she be realistically held to have consented to pregnancy?* Your argument (as I’m reading it) is that sexual intercourse carries with it an inherent risk of pregnancy, therefore to have sex is to consent to pregnancy. If one is reliably informed that sexual intercourse carries zero risk of pregnancy, then even by your argument, no consent can be given. Is it then acceptable for that woman to terminate that pregnancy at any point? Why?
In a related question, do you think persons severely injured in automotible accidents should be entitled to recover damages (assume for the sake of argument they were personally blameless in the causation of the accident)? If so, why, and how is that consistent with your position on “consent” to pregnancy?
Where on your moral compass does a woman who is able to conceive, but medically unable to carry to term fall if she gets pregnant? Is it morally wrong for her to have unprotected sex, knowing that she may conceive but will miscarry any pregnancy she begins?** Abortion does not come into this question, even.
*I personally know at least one woman who had a child conceived after a tubal ligation. Her doctor isn’t sure if the original surgery was botched or if there was some sort of regeneration - but the result is the same. For those keeping score at home, she gave the baby up for adoption at birth.
**IMHO considerably less moral than striving to prevent pregnancy, and deciding to terminate if your methods to prevent prove unsuccessful, but I can see a YMMV here.
Most likely, since male rape victims have already been declared the fathers of the children their rapists bore and ordered to pay child support.
Interesting question: A fire breaks out at an in vitro lab. Only one “person” can be saved: a two year old child or a zygote. Which one would you choose?
A fire breaks out somewhere. Only one person can be saved: a two year old child or a 40 year old man. Which one would you choose? If you choose the child, is the man any less of a person? Or vice versa?
Having to make a Sophie’s choice doesn’t mean that one person inherently has more value than the other.
You don’t believe that a two year old child has inherently more value than a one cell zygote? 
Couldn’t you say the same thing about alot of things?
Say a 6 year old falls out of a 22 story building from the 22 floor. Isn’t the building builder responsible for murder because che built a building with the potential for it to kill?
Now lets say the building builder puts up screens and fences so the kid had to climb to fall off (condoms and spermicidal jells). Is che still guilty of murder?
Che knew it was a definite risk, but built that building anyway.
Is Smith and Wesson guilty every time they sell a gun that’s used to commit a crime?
Heck if you have kids and they do bad things are you guilty?
There’s a big difference between sex for pleasure, love, and closeness, and shoving a turkey baster in your cunt. To be blunt.
The male the sperm came from is just as responsible. Surely you also support some sort of forced tick for tack so he’s equally punished?*
*like for example having to wear a pregnancy suit, maybe some drugs to induce male lactation, some drugs to screw with his horomone levels, maybe some electrodes to simulate contractions…
Just thinking about that all that makes me glad I’m an outtie:D
Anyway if you say no then why should the female be sentenced to that?
Perhaps the providence the female has over her own body outweighs the right of the fetus to use it?
Letting the cat out of the box is much less involved then carrying a child and giving birth.
What I was saying was that your example dilemma didn’t necessarily illustrate that the child has more value than the zygote. You think it’s a “gotcha” that virtually everyone, even pro-lifers, would pick the child. But there are plenty of one-to-one examples you could give…if you always have to pick only one, then you can’t necessarily be saying that the one you don’t pick doesn’t have value.
I think that in the scenario I gave, virutally everyone would pick the child over the adult. Does this mean the adult has no value, or is not a person?