are you asking me personally, or when do I think the State should consider an embryo a person and thus deserving of protection? If you are asking me personally, I would say that I would morally consider it a person at conception. However, I need to be clear that this is a view based purely on a religious and personal moral conviction (and difficult to defend from a scientific standpoint), that I would not expect others to necessary agree with. And in fact I would not hold it against them if they disagreed. Such a belief would inform my own decisions and I don’t think it would be fair to impose it on others. From a scientific standpoint, I think a logical and defensible position is that life for fetus begins at heartbeat. It’s not a consensus answer to the age old question of when life begins, but at least some states base their laws on such a position and I would be comfortable with that interpretation being the basis of laws and legal decisions.
no, it’s been addressed to death by her critics already. Go read them
Wait, you mean we could have just posted
We_re_wolves_not_werewolves your arguments have been addressed to death by the critics of your arguments already. Go read them.
and saved ourselves all that time we wasted posting? Kinda like that joke about prisoners telling jokes by calling out numbers?
So, would you save the frozen embryos or the toddler?
what do you want me to say man, I’m not a moral ethicist. It was a good argument when Thomson made it. The analogy is not perfect though and critics have pointed to these dissimilarities to try to distinguish it from abortion. I don’t have anything new or profound to add, and it’s not really the main point of this thread anyway, so why do you keep asking?
Because if the state has the power to force a woman to be the life support system for an unborn child then what exactly stops the state from making organ donation mandatory . . . and I’m not talking posthumous organ retrieval.
Also, 361, 720, and 485.
It’s a valid question, and if we are being honest I would say the toddler. Obviously that raises the question why, if that is one life and the fertilized eggs are 1000 lives based on my personal belief as stated above. To that I can only say the answer is the same as to why someone would choose to save their own child instead of a bus full of strangers, the urgency and directness of seeing a human child in trouble would override any kind of theoretical or abstract “greater good” line of reasoning we can practice on discussion boards.
It’s the same urgency, 1,000 fold more urgent, if you actually believe that a fertilized egg and a born baby are the same thing.
well, to start, one is a forced action while the other is prevention of action. It’s illegal for you to rob someone, but you don’t have an obligation to stop a criminal from stealing a stranger’s car in the parking lot while you load your groceries in your trunk. Forcing action on its citizens requires a much higher level of justification from the State than prohibiting some action.
Yes, one is a forcing you to be pregnant against your will, while the other is preventing you from not donating blood to your local blood bank.
One more data point, which – hopefully, correctly – I assume fits legitimately here.
The Slippery Slope Argument is overwhelmingly considered to be a logical fallacy in discussions and debate. But there is one standout exception: the Supreme Court of the United States. They are charged with having sufficient wisdom and foresight to understand the potential long-term implications of the decisions that they make.
Though it was only one Associate Justice, one SC Justice has a leviathan bully pulpit. Let me remind folks of what that one justice had to say about/after Dobbs:
In his concurring opinion, Thomas — an appointee of President George H.W. Bush — wrote that the justices “should reconsider all of this Court’s substantive due process precedents, including Griswold, Lawrence, and Obergefell” — referring to three cases having to do with Americans’ fundamental privacy, due process and equal protection rights.
Justice Thomas: SCOTUS ‘should reconsider’ contraception, same-sex marriage rulings
So, what’s the point of abolishing abortion? Here’s my answer:
The arc of the moral universe is long but it bends toward justice.
It seems like the point is to dramatically begin to bend it back.
And never forget that Justice Thomas conspicuously neglected to include Loving v. Virginia in that extremely short list.
Conservatism consists of exactly one proposition, to wit: There must be in-groups whom the law protects but does not bind, alongside out-groups whom the law binds but does not protect.
–Frank Wilhoit
We don’t make those kinds of decisions in a logical manner. It’s whichever you are more emotionally attached. If your child is in one end of the building, how many children need to be on the other end for you to decide to save them rather than your own child? If it’s 1 vs 1, then you save your child. But 1 vs 10? 1 vs 100? 1 vs 1000? At what point do you decide to save the others rather than your own child? I would even assume that the emotional aspect applies even if it was your pet. If your dog is in one end and a stranger is in the other end, which do you save? In none of those scenarios would people make logical choices. Emotions would greatly influence their decisions.
The hypothetical does not include any of the children being your own. Reducing it to ‘Do you actually look at a Dewar of fertilized eggs and see children or not?’
nope, you are already pregnant…you are prevented from taking action to change that. I don’t even know what your mangled second clause is trying to say.
If the state can force you to be pregnant then it can also force you to donate blood. They are both violations of bodily autonomy. And in no way comparable, a blood donation is so de minimis compared to a full term pregnancy that there could be no legitimate objection to requiring it.
Also,
Nope, you are already hooked up to the violinist…you are prevented from taking action to change that.
Without having an emotional component, it’s not really a valid comparison. Our brains aren’t wired to see eggs and have the illogical emotional connection activated like we are when we see a human form. For it to be more relevant to the abortion discussion, there should be a compatible emotional aspect. For instance, consider a scenario like this. Your office building catches fire and on one end of the building is a pregnant person and in the other end are 3 non-pregnant people. If pregnancy was not an issue, you’d save the 3 people. But with pregnancy, when do you decide to save the single pregnant person over the 3 others? How many fertilized eggs would cause you to consider it better to save the pregnant person over the others? Do you see a pregnant person with triplets as equivalent to 4 people? This is a very contrived scenario, but it has the emotional aspect that will give a more realistic answer about how much someone considers an egg a child.
And why aren’t we wired to see frozen cells as people? Maybe it’s because they AREN’T people.
OK, this was what I was getting at. Where is all this money and political power coming from? It seems to me it’s regular people who don’t want the unborn killed. RvW never directly addressed this which I think the court will have to rule on at some point.
It’s been so long since I researched the decision but I think the SC has already done the homework on it.
RvW had the pretty reasonable position that if the fetus is viable, you can’t kill it without extraordinary cause (like, otherwise the mother will die.) But if the Ferris isn’t viable, and removing it it’s the same as killing it, then it’s okay to kill it, as that’s the only way the mother can be rid of it.
I mentioned above my friend who had an emergency c-section when her pregnancy threatened her life. I assume that it would have been illegal to intentionally abort her baby, because the danger to her could be resolved by removing it in a non-deadly way.
And why wouldn’t right-wing power brokers go after the anti-abortion market? It makes perfect sense to me.