What I’m saying has nothing to do with any false assumption that “every death involves murder”.
The point is that many abortion opponents claim to believe that abortion is murder because fertilized ova etc. are just as much fully human persons as born babies are.
Yet they ignore, or simply haven’t thought through, the fact that if we really accepted that a fertilized ovum is just as much a fully human person as a born baby, we would have to make major (and in many cases, frankly impossible) changes to our legal and social structures, in order to consistently treat fertilized ova like other fully human persons.
If we actually consistently implemented in our society a belief that fertilized ova are fully human persons, we would have to change a hell of a lot more than just making abortion illegal.
If somebody’s not advocating making those sweeping fundamental changes in accordance with the principle of fetal full personhood, then they’re not being consistent when they claim to oppose abortion on the grounds that fetuses are fully persons.
I believe that you might be putting words in their mouths. I have never heard one claim that “fertilized ova etc. are just as much fully human persons as born babies are.” I have heard them claim that life begins at conception and that the unborn deserve (at least some degree) of legal protection. Would you consider a pro-choice supporter hypocritical (or confused) if they didn’t believe that a mother should have the option of aborting their unborn child 5 minutes before its birth?
If they’re claiming that “abortion is murder”, and especially if they use that belief to justify their opposition to, e.g., the morning-after pill and various forms of birth control as well as to surgical abortion, then yes, they are claiming that those pre-born lives are fully human.
Murder is the deliberate killing of a living human person—not just human tissue or human genetic material, but a human person. If you claim to believe that abortion is murder, then you are asserting that the aborted are fully human persons.
Mind you, as I said previously, it’s perfectly possible to make a logically consistent argument against abortion without professing the belief that abortion is murder. But if you think that abortion is murder, then that implies that its victims are fully human persons. And that obligates you to think through and accept the full consequences of treating pre-born lives as fully human persons, in all circumstances.
I do not know what the phrase “life begins at conception” means unless it means “full human personhood begins at conception”. If it means something else to those who use it, then presumably they don’t consider that abortion is murder.
[QUOTE=Nars Glinley]
Would you consider a pro-choice supporter hypocritical (or confused) if they didn’t believe that a mother should have the option of aborting their unborn child 5 minutes before its birth?
[/QUOTE]
If the pro-choice supporter claims to believe that an embryo/fetus is not a distinct human person but just an optional part of the pregnant woman’s body right up to the moment of birth, then yes, they’d be hypocritical or confused if they sought to restrict the woman’s right to destroy her fetus at any time before the moment of birth.
But of course, there are plenty of logically consistent arguments to be made in favor of some degree of abortion rights without professing the belief that the unborn are nothing but parts of a woman’s body.
Correct. Now all you need to do is point to pro-lifers supporting rights (ceteris paribus) for fetuses that they don’t support for babies. I don’t think your notion of “death certificates as a human right” is particularly appropriate, and not on practical grounds either.
You keep claiming that pro-lifers aren’t being consistent. Could you please come up with some examples of this?
I would submit it to the Washington Post if I thought they were interested in the truth. As for the medical journals, they are already aware because they are looking at the data and not just MSNBC. In 201313% of black babies were born underweight and 2.9% were born extremely underweight. Hispanics which have roughly similar average incomes had 7.1% and 1.2%. Indians and Eskimos have lower average incomes than black but they had 7.5% and 1.3%.
That is for the whole country not just for one city in Ohio.
As an example, they would have to press hard for laws forbidding pregnant women from engaging in strenuous physical activity, and for laws forbidding pregnant women from drinking alcohol, etc. etc.
(They’ve actually toyed a little with that latter…)
If your grandpa had been in a vegetative state for years, and a cadre of doctors thought there was no hope of him ever regaining meaningful brain activity, I’d still be tried for murder if I decided his continued existence was a waste of resources and took it upon myself to dismember him.
Okay, sure, grandpa was once a sentient being, but if he’s not now it’s just sentimentality to grant him continued personhood based on his past while at the same time making no consideration of a fetus’s potential for sentience. The present is all the matters, right?
I hope you realize – though you evidently don’t – that when you start claiming the Washington Post has no interest in the truth, you have entered into all-out conspiracy theory territory.
Which I suppose is all you can do when the facts just don’t support your story. Nothing you have quoted supports your position, and does nothing to refute what I said about the socioeconomic causes of infant mortality in the US, which if you look closely are scholarly studies and not “MSNBC” and are typical of a wide range of such studies (and not “just one city in Ohio”).
I have no quarrel with the numbers you posted – the problem is that they don’t even remotely mean what you claim they mean. Black moms may indeed have nearly twice the rate of low birth weight babies as the average, but your own cite states at the very beginning that the mortality from low birth weight is only about 1%. This is so low that all kinds of major socioeconomic factors affecting the health of mother and child are far more dominant, and that’s why the studies I cited reach the conclusions they do.
I don’t think you really want to go there, as it’s very damaging to your cause. You might recall that during the Terry Schiavo fiasco, where Republicans managed to turn a family tragedy into a political circus, it was almost exactly the same bunch of pro-life right-wing ideologues and religious zealots who claimed that Schiavo was aware and sentient, communicating with her mother, and you could “see in her eyes” how aware she was. I’m just surprised that these fools didn’t bring in a Ouija board to talk to her (or maybe they did). And of course the autopsy eventually revealed that her brain had died long ago, at just the time that medical science said it had, every single major brain function had been permanently and irrepairably damaged, and the brain itself had atrophied to half its normal size. But Republicans and pro-life zealots knew better.
And it’s utterly facile to dredge up the old “fetus potential” canard. Of course a fetus has potential. So does the female egg at the moment of conception. So does any female egg before conception. So does a couple out on the first date, or any hypothetical pairing of any man or woman on the planet. By that logic, every woman on earth must be impregnated monthly, or an angel somewhere sheds a tear.
No, one’s argument doesn’t matter if it hinges on a cherry picked extreme case, else it would be valid to accuse all pro-lifers of complicity in murder when a doctor gets shot.
You’re still misunderstanding the argument. The particular subset of pro-lifers who claim to believe that “abortion is murder”, because an ovum/embryo/fetus is just as fully human as a baby, are being inconsistent:
not because they’re supporting more rights/personhood for ova/embryos/fetuses than for babies, which they’re not,
but because they avoid addressing what it would really require for a society to actually treat ova/embryos/fetuses as fully human on a par with babies, except in the particular case of abortion.
In other words, these pro-lifers in practice are supporting less rights/personhood for ova/embryos/fetuses than for babies. This is inconsistent with their claim to regard ova/embryos/fetuses as fully human persons just as much as babies are.
There are many significant ways (some of which I’ve pointed out above) in which we as a society acknowledge and protect the full human personhood of babies but do not do the same for the pre-born. (In fact, most of those acknowledgements and protections would be pragmatically impossible and/or tyrannically invasive if we tried to extend them to the pre-born. Which is one of the reasons that our society overall doesn’t regard the pre-born as fully human persons.)
But the only recognition/protection of the alleged full human personhood of ova/embryos/fetuses that the “abortion is murder” pro-lifers are apparently willing to seriously address is abortion. When it comes to the harder questions of how we could possibly implement a consistent approach to treating ova/embryos/fetuses as fully human persons, these pro-lifers’ substantive contribution to the discourse is jack shit.
Tacitly accepting the default societal assumption that the pre-born are not fully human persons in situations where treating them as fully human persons would be unworkably impractical or unethical, and then insisting that the pre-born are fully human persons in the one specific situation of abortion, is not a logically consistent approach to the issue of fetal personhood. And that’s what the “abortion is murder” pro-lifers are doing. Shodan, pretty much every time I’ve tried to explain this to you, you come back with a new misunderstanding of what I’m actually saying: e.g., you imagine that I’m claiming that pro-lifers say fetuses should be able to vote, or that there’s an individual right to a death certificate, or that consistency requires considering the same specific actions neglectful in the case of both fetuses and children, or that pro-lifers are supporting more rights/personhood for fetuses than for babies, or something equally nonsensical. You’re evidently somewhat in over your head with the logic of this argument, and I don’t know how to explain it to you any more clearly. Most other posters seem to have grasped it okay.
I agree with your major premise, but want to nitpick that fetal homicide laws are another way in which society – not just the pro-life community, but certainly spearheaded by them – gives “civil rights” to fetuses.
You’re very right that there is a significant disconnect in the pro-life philosophy. The standard thought-experiment is whether one would rescue one six-week-old baby from a burning building, or sixty frozen fertilized ova.
Out of curiosity–if a man threatens to commit suicide unless he gets a unilateral opt-out from paying child support, then should this man get a unilateral opt-out from paying child support?
Also, though, I would like to point out that the “back-alley” argument can likewise be used (and more convincingly*, I might add) in regards to things such as surgical castration as well:
*With things such as surgical castration, unlike with abortion, there is absolutely no doubt that there are no other parties involved in this.
Actually, a better question would be whether or not firefighters (who, as far as I know, are the employees of some government–please correct me if I am wrong in regards to this) should be legally required to save 60 frozen zygotes or one 6-week-old baby from a burning building (and assuming that they cannot save both). After all, this will ensure that pro-lifers would be unable to utilize the “personal value” response to this question. (To elaborate on this, a pro-lifer can say that he or she would personally save his or her mother over 100 babies if he or she could not save both; however, in this case, it would be a case of personal morals–in contrast, with firefighters, it is a matter of the law and of public policy).
There–does that make sense? Also, I’m sorry if my thoughts on this are “all over the place.”
How effective would such medical research actually be, though?
Also, I (a pro-choicer) would like to point out that all humans eventually die. Indeed, over 99.99% of all humans die before they are able to reach age 120. Thus, how about the Democrats support investing large amounts of government money in efforts to develop successful technology which will slow down and perhaps even halt or cure aging?
They do not provide prenatal care. Just want to clear that up, although the thread has moved on. Crisis Pregnancy Centers do NOT provide prenatal care. They exist to talk women out of abortions. They use some medical equipment, like ultrasounds, in order to more effectively do this. One of their tactics is to fool a woman into thinking they’re providing prenatal care until the pregnancy has passed the point where legal abortion is an option. Then they tell her they can’t help anymore, because they’re not qualified to deliver the baby, leaving a confused pregnant woman to find an OB in her second or third trimester, never having received proper prenatal care. And what’s the biggest factor in preterm births, maternal mortality, and sick babies? Lack of prenatal care.
They put on a good facade. People that work there wear scrubs and labcoats and hang stethoscopes around their necks. But there is no doctor. No midwife. No one is there who is qualified to diagnose gestational diabetes or eclampsia, or, technically, legally, even pregnancy.
Once more for the back row, because this is really important for people everywhere to know: **Crisis Pregnancy Centers do NOT provide prenatal care. **