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Boris Godunov
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Portland, OR
Aug 2001
time: 00:30
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quote:
Originally posted by beingofone
I am talking about emotional health. Do you think it is natural for a mother to kill her offspring?
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Funny that I already addressed the emotional health aspect. The only thing I see here is a blatant emotional appeal.
Plenty of women suffer psychological trauma from childbirth. Post-partum depression, anyone? That's why I mentioned Andrea Yates.
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I notice you just choose to ignore what I said. That is why we should do away with childbirth. |
That's not relevant to what I said. I'm not arguing that childbirth is somehow in need of banning. I'm advocating choice--so a woman can choose to undergo childbirth, or not. The risks are hers to weigh and to take. My entire point is that just because a procedure--be it childbirth or abortion--has risks and consequences does NOT prove it is a procedure in need of banning.
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Oh of course not - it is perfectly OK to kill are unborn children. It is in our best interest. |
Emotional appeal. Certainly in instances it is in the best interest to perform an abortion. Unless you think women with medical complications should be forced to carry a baby to term even if it means killing them. You don't advocate that now, do you?
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You fail to acknowledge the fact that the abortions are what crippled her. |
And how do you know that not having abortions wouldn't have been as bad for her? Or not specifically her, for some other woman?
Your using anecdotal evidence, which is pretty worthless in an argument such as this. Hence why I mentioned comparing the actual statistical numbers of women suffering ill effects from childbirth to those from abortions.
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Yes I was going to take full responsibilty for the children.
And me being a father actually having the audacity to think I have a say in the matter. |
You had every right to voice your opinion. But I see no reason why you should have any legal veto power over the woman, who is the one who has to actually bear the children. You've again utterly failed to provide any rationale for your having some sort of right to force a woman to endure an unwanted pregnancy.
Just curious, but how is it this woman (or is it just one?) came to have two abortions?
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Like I said we sould do away with childbirth to protect the rights of all women against the tyranny of the fetus and the inherent danger of keeping our species in existence |
I don't have any idea what the point of this statement is. I don't think our species is in any danger of extinction any time soon, and certainly not because of people having abortions. What a laughably absurd implication! And yet another emotional appeal to boot.
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Do you people actually believe I have not considered this and adoption? I experienced this. |
Considering something and actually doing it are two very different things. You haven't seen fit to elaborate any. If you tried to adopt and were denied, I'd be curious as to why.
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beingofone
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U.S.A.
Apr 2003
time: 05:30
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quote:
Originally posted by Spiffor
quote:
Originally posted by beingofone
You cannot see your own circular reasoning. |
I don't understand how the following statement "it would have been OK if my mother had aborted me" is circular reasoning. Please explain. |
If you grew and your life became valuable because of your growth, then your life has no value today because you will grow in some way tomorrow.
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At what point did your life become valuable? Yesterday or the day before? |
When I developed a survival instinct, i.e. an active willingness to save my life, that comes along a nervous system. At about 3-4 monthes in the womb. |
Do you remember when you devoloped this survival instinct so that you knew your life had value? And how do you know your life has value right now?
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Be aware that it is a common debating practice here, for people only to respond to the particular topics that interest them. Boris answered to your anguish at not having children, I responded on the "meaning of life" aspect of your post, etc. Such behavious is something to be expected on this forum, where people came for entertainment and not for work. As far as I know, only Berzerker can sustain a debate where he adresses each and every line of text written by the others. And trust me, it grows tiring very quickly  |
Thank you for taking the time to explain.
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However, here are my answers to your arguments in your "A Perspective" post.
So, let's see, your arguments in general are:
1. How can we decide what is human and what is not?
2. The argument that the mother should decide, because the fetus is a parasite of her body, is moot.
3. The meaing of an individual's life
4. Men should have a choice too.
5. The danger of abortion to the mother.
6. "This world has made the most precious of all gifts, LIFE cheap and disposable."
Please tell me if I missed anything.
Wrt 1: The only way we can decide precisely what is human and what is not, is to have a collective agreement of what humanity entails. Science offers such an agreeable measure, with the barrier of species: a human can reproduce with another human to make a reproducible individual. Law offers another definition: a human has rights once it's born. Tradition offers yet another definition: in many traditional socieities, a human had no rights until well after birth, and infanticide was common. |
I see - so if someone else decides you are subhuman - such as the collective agreement about Jews in in Germany 1936 or the worlds view of Africans in the 1700`s. You should just check out because the majority decides that would be the best thing for everyone.
After all you are not really a human so no loss.
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The law's job is to offer rules that improve society while caring for individual rights. The law should thus have in mind the social implications of abortion, and not some sense of morals or another.
To put it simply, an abortion ban favors the appearance of back-alley abortionists whose practices are very dangerous to the health of the mother, it also favors the emergence of a population of unwanted children who won't have a caring or stable environment to grow up in. It'll wreck their lives, as much as their environment's. The law shouldn't favor such an obvious cause of criminal or deviant behaviours, as well as utter misery. It would be against individual rights to forbid people to have children, or to force them to have abortions. However, it is completely consistent with individual rights to offer the choice to do it.
The law differs from country to country when it comes to abortion. The US allows abortion on-demand until birth. Most European countries allow abortion on-demand until the third or fourth month. Many countries ban abortion outright. These different definitions come in part from the delicate balance between thhuman rights of the unborn child, and the social implications of unwanted birth. |
Please tell me who chooses what is moral for you? Do you leave that decision in the hands of someone else?Do you let the courts or the majority decide what is a moral obligation for you?
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2. I agree the argument is bunk.
3. This is the point I adressed |
thank you for your honesty
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4. I agree men should have a choice. I consider that both should be able to decide whether there will be an abortion. If one adamantly wants the child, however, there should be a legal arrangement for the child to be born and to be taken care of exclusively by the willing parent. If the willing parent is the father, he should compensate all ill side effects that come with the pregnancy (delayed studies, missed career opportunities, plus of course the stress of undergoing an unwanted and painful period of life) |
Again thanks
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5. Abortions can be dangerous to the woman's mental health, and repeated abortions can have ill side-effects on a woman's reproducive ability. True. But these side effects are dwarfed by the ills that can happen with an unwanted pregnancy. Your argument is bunk, as it is akin to banning all medicine because of its occasional side effects. |
Cutting off an ingrown toenail and aborting what would have been a child is not in the same stadium. Unless of course you just choose to be in denial of the reality of life.
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6. Life has always been cheap and disposable. Even if you focus on human life, it has always known mass slaughters during wars, and it has always known infanticide. Not to mention death penalty, making labourers work to death, etc.
Abortion brings absolutely nothing new in that regard. |
So two wrongs make a right?
Urban Ranger
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No system in nature has a single point of mode change. Even electronic systems have delays and margins of error. What makes you think that biological systems behave differently? |
Soy change is the key issue? At what change did you aquire meaning and humanity?
Boris Godunov
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Funny that I already addressed the emotional health aspect. The only thing I see here is a blatant emotional appeal. |
If someone wanted to end your life - I wonder if we would not hear a "blatant emotional appeal".
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Plenty of women suffer psychological trauma from childbirth. Post-partum depression, anyone? That's why I mentioned Andrea Yates. |
Yes there is proof that childbirth depression has induced trauma to women and men for thousands of years.
That is why we must stop it and stop it now.
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That's not relevant to what I said. I'm not arguing that childbirth is somehow in need of banning. I'm advocating choice--so a woman can choose to undergo childbirth, or not. The risks are hers to weigh and to take. My entire point is that just because a procedure--be it childbirth or abortion--has risks and consequences does NOT prove it is a procedure in need of banning. |
Just because nazi experiments with Jews were "risky" doesn`t mean we did not gain, as a whole, major modern medical breakthroughs.
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Emotional appeal. Certainly in instances it is in the best interest to perform an abortion. Unless you think women with medical complications should be forced to carry a baby to term even if it means killing them. You don't advocate that now, do you? |
Just because I have emotion does not make me less intelligent or less human. In fact it makes me more, because I do not live in the denial that I experience emotion.
In certain cases I believe abortion should be allowed. I do not believe it is an alternative birth control method.
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And how do you know that not having abortions wouldn't have been as bad for her? Or not specifically her, for some other woman? |
Because ah um I knew her and you did not.
Common sense rather then listening to propoganda.
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Hence why I mentioned comparing the actual statistical numbers of women suffering ill effects from childbirth to those from abortions. |
47.9 % of ALL STATISTICS - are made up right on the spot.
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But I see no reason why you should have any legal veto power over the woman, who is the one who has to actually bear the children. |
I see no reason why the mother if reasonably stressed out - should not have the right to end her childs life up to the age of say 15.
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Considering something and actually doing it are two very different things. You haven't seen fit to elaborate any. If you tried to adopt and were denied, I'd be curious as to why. |
Because it would take up 4 forum pages.
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Spiffor
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CPA - Evil Clone brigade
Nov 2001
time: 06:30
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quote:
Originally posted by beingofone
If you grew and your life became valuable because of your growth, then your life has no value today because you will grow in some way tomorrow. |
I will probably value my life even more in 6 weeks, once I have given my uni paper (or feel like utter crap fi I can't make it in time), that's true  But other than those really marginal modifications to my feeling of self-worth, I have valued my life pretty much evenly since I developed a survival instinct.
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Do you remember when you devoloped this survival instinct so that you knew your life had value? |
I don't remember. I am drawing conclusions.
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And how do you know your life has value right now? |
Very simply: I value it to the point that I don't wish to die. My life is worth something to me = my life has value.
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Thank you for taking the time to explain. |
You're welcome Sometimes this place can look a bit outlandish.
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I see - so if someone else decides you are subhuman - such as the collective agreement about Jews in in Germany 1936 or the worlds view of Africans in the 1700`s. You should just check out because the majority decides that would be the best thing for everyone.
After all you are not really a human so no loss. |
If the majority or the powerful decide that I'm not human, I'll probably stand up for my rights. But that implies that I have the ability to value my humanity. A 7-week-old certainly cannot.
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Please tell me who chooses what is moral for you? Do you leave that decision in the hands of someone else?Do you let the courts or the majority decide what is a moral obligation for you? |
They decide what are my obligations. Do you like to pay taxes? Do you like the idea of the draft? Do you like a ban on guns (something most countries enforce) ? There are plenty of bans and obligations that are the standard fare of States, even democratic ones.
Forunately, abortion isn't one of those. Nobody forces you to have an abortion. Abortion, however, is here to prevent you from being forced (by somebody else or by an accident) to give birth. Abortion is about choice and not about coercion.
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thank you for your honesty
Again thanks |
You're welcome But you know, it wasn't really an effort for me, it's not like I admitted some ideologically-impure crime
I think I have a much less extreme POV than moost Americans, but this comes from the big difference in the American and European debates about abortion. In the US, both sides are extremely polarized, and both defend positions that are flabbergasting to the average European: the anti-abortion ones oppose abortion from the day of conception, when the embryo is nothing more than a lump of chair devoid of any ability to feel on its own... And the pro-abortionists justify abortion on demand until right before birth, when the unborn child is exactly like a baby (except that it doesn't scream yet). Stefu, one of our Finns, calls this position "utterly ghoulish", and pretty much every Euro here will agree with that.
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Cutting off an ingrown toenail and aborting what would have been a child is not in the same stadium. |
It depends how you look at it. If you look at it as "what would have becomne a child", of course it's different, because you grant more value to that particular lump of flesh (I'm talking about embrioes here, not fetuses) than to the other particular lump of flesh that is your toe.
However, if you see it as "a lump of flesh I should remove before it is actually a human person to whom I can only offer a life of sorrow", then abortion warrants more than indifference, it warrants relief.
And of course, you have some people who don't think either way, and who are as indifferent of their embryo as they are of their toenail.
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Unless of course you just choose to be in denial of the reality of life. |
The reality of life is that we are fantastically complex chemical processes. We are so complex that we even defend our own existance. Embryos don't. Embryos are far less complex than a born child, and far less complex than fetuses. They don't defend their life any more than a lump of your skin. Actually, before developing feelings on their own, they are a completely dependent part of the mother's body as much as a lump of skin.
When the fetus develops feelings on its own (feeling of pain, especially), that flesh stops to become exclusively the flesh of the mother, and begins to be the flesh of the child.
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So two wrongs make a right? |
Nope, but I was adressing the point that abortion brings something new, that things were better before abortion. They weren't.
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David Floyd
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The bottom of a large bottle of beer
Jan 1970
time: 05:30
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The rest of y'all are doing a great job debating against the anti-abortion crowd, so I'll lay off - I mainly like debating BK anyway, and he seems to have left.
However,
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As soon as the great drs of our time find a way to remove a fetus and implant it into the man I still say he has no choice in the matter. Lets get real if population of the earth depended on men giving birth our species would die off real quick. |
Fine, Mrs. Tuberski. In that case, women who insist on keeping a child, even when the father is against it, should not be automatically entitled to child support.
You see, that issue right there is what makes it unfair for men to have no input - there is a usually automatic and severe economic burden involved.
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Tuberski
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ACK!!! PTHBBPPPTTT!!!!
Feb 2002
time: 23:30
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quote:
Originally posted by David Floyd
The rest of y'all are doing a great job debating against the anti-abortion crowd, so I'll lay off - I mainly like debating BK anyway, and he seems to have left.
However,
Fine, Mrs. Tuberski. In that case, women who insist on keeping a child, even when the father is against it, should not be automatically entitled to child support.
You see, that issue right there is what makes it unfair for men to have no input - there is a usually automatic and severe economic burden involved. |
You are barking up the wrong tree, I think she would agree with you there.
However, I'm not going to wake her up to find out. 
ACK!
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beingofone
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U.S.A.
Apr 2003
time: 05:30
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Spiffor
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I will probably value my life even more in 6 weeks, once I have given my uni paper (or feel like utter crap fi I can't make it in time), that's true But other than those really marginal modifications to my feeling of self-worth, I have valued my life pretty much evenly since I developed a survival instinct. |
LOL
I agree with you. YOUR LIFE IS PRICELESS because it is all the existence you will ever know. Life is precious to the one who is living it.
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If the majority or the powerful decide that I'm not human, I'll probably stand up for my rights. But that implies that I have the ability to value my humanity. A 7-week-old certainly cannot. |
You contradicted yourself.
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Do you remember when you devoloped this survival instinct so that you knew your life had value? |
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I don't remember. I am drawing conclusions. |
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They decide what are my obligations. |
I said moral obligations.
If the government where you live decided that all blue eyed people were uneeded for the betterment of society. Would you be morally obligated in helping extinguishing their existence?
If someone else or something else ever and I mean EVER decides what is right and wrong for you. Then I would feel sorry for you. If you can`t be true to your own convictions even if the rest of the world went completely loopy (like I view it right now). How would your life continue to have much meaning to you?
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It depends how you look at it. If you look at it as "what would have becomne a child", |
Well lets look at it this way. Were you a fetus at one time? How valuable was that specific fetus that you were?
I am going to say something personal but please don`t take offense. Take it with the spirit in which it is said.
You have been brainwashed by all the higher modern enlightened educational institutions who could not reason their way out of a paper bag.
Its just big business that appears to be noble (making claims its for the betterment of mankind) - but the truth is, it is fueled by animal greed and avorice. Without any regard for any life other then "self preservation".
It is extreme evil in that it has made killing our own children something noble and good.
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Embryos don't. Embryos are far less complex than a born child
When the fetus develops feelings on its own |
You were an embryo at one time, how valuable was that specific embryo?
When did you start to have feelings?
Urban Ranger
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Simple. As soon as some organism displays sentience. |
It is very easy to point your finger at a fetus and say " it is not sentient"
When did you have your first sentient experience? Go ahead and desribe the memory for us.
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Spiffor
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CPA - Evil Clone brigade
Nov 2001
time: 06:30
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quote:
Originally posted by beingofone
I agree with you. YOUR LIFE IS PRICELESS because it is all the existence you will ever know. Life is precious to the one who is living it. |
Absolutely. Because it is all the existence I'll ever know.
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You contradicted yourself. |
I consider the nervous system to be prerequisite of feelings and survival instinct (which is not precisley stupid, considering that all our senses and our thoughts are transmitted throught the nervous system. No nerves no pain - No nerves no thought. And the nervous system slowly begins to develop after 3 monthes.
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I said moral obligations.
If the government where you live decided that all blue eyed people were uneeded for the betterment of society. Would you be morally obligated in helping extinguishing their existence? |
If the government ordered the extermination of blue-eyed people, I wouldn't be morally obligated. I would be obligated, independent of morals. Now I may try to resist the obligation (especially considering that I'm blue-eyed myself ), but that doesn't make the obligation any less true.
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If someone else or something else ever and I mean EVER decides what is right and wrong for you. Then I would feel sorry for you. |
I have an ethics that is my own. I don't base it on what other people say. However, moralks and ethics are often not connected with the law. And it is the law that forces, bans, or allows things.
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If you can`t be true to your own convictions even if the rest of the world went completely loopy (like I view it right now). How would your life continue to have much meaning to you? |
You can fight the system. I'm not sure if many people are forced to do some things they consider immoral in a democracy, but I can think of one example: Libertarians, at least the hardcore ones, consider taxes to be theft and utterly immoral. Yet they do pay their taxes, because they're forced to. I don't think they give no value to their life. At the opposite, they fight the system.
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Well lets look at it this way. Were you a fetus at one time? How valuable was that specific fetus that you were? |
Back when I was a fetus? I suppose I was worth everything to me... Back when I was a nerveless embryo? I had no more worth than what my mother granted me, because "I" could not attribute value to my life.
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You have been brainwashed by all the higher modern enlightened educational institutions who could not reason their way out of a paper bag.
Its just big business that appears to be noble (making claims its for the betterment of mankind) - but the truth is, it is fueled by animal greed and avorice. Without any regard for any life other then "self preservation".
It is extreme evil in that it has made killing our own children something noble and good. |
I take no offense, but I think you are wrong. I have put much thought into abortion, and I am not merely parroting what I heard elsewhere. I am right at the age where abortion is an important issue, because I'm at the age where we want to have sex, but are not ready to raise children.
When it comes to ethical issues like this, the fact that an individual has human genes or not is not what primarily matters to me. What primarily matters is whether the human can 1) feel pain and 2) value its life. An embryo in the early stages of development can neither. A fetus in the late stages can 1 for sure, and likely can 2. A terminally ill person who wants a euthanasia can 1 but doesn't 2 anymore.
This is what makes both the abortion of embrioes in the early stages of development OK in my book, as well as the euthanasia of those who want one (And on the euthanasia debate, I am especially stringent about the need for the euthanasied individual to give an informed consent).
Now, you'll tell me there is a difference between tolerating abortion and supporting abortion. I'm in the latter, and here is why: the nerveless embryo, if not aborted, will grow to become a person. And in the case of many unwanted pregnancies, the baby will be born in a family that is simply unable to raise it properly. Do you really think the average 15-year-old can raise her baby properly? Do you really think the 20-year-old MacJob / Student can raise her child properly? Do you really think the 25-year-old lone and poor woman with 3 children can sustain raise a fourth one properly? I think not. A proper education requires time, money, and love (in some cases, it's useful to mention mental stability).
You'll tell me that all aborting women are not necessarily un-ready to welcome a new child. Some do this out of "greed" in order not to threaten their careers or their studies. And it's true. But even then, I think it's better if the unwanted child (a child so adamantly unwanted that even a prepared mother rejects it) is aborted before it can experience the hatred and bitterness that the unwanting mother is likely to spew.
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You were an embryo at one time, how valuable was that specific embryo? |
The value my mom attributed to it. Since she would be married real soon, and since both my parents actively wanted a baby, I guess my embryo had quite some value then.
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When did you start to have feelings? |
Again, I think I have begun to feel pain in the womb, at about 3 months.
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Ned
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of Aptos, CA
Oct 1999
time: 21:30
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Spiffor, you and I come out fairly close if not congruent on these issues. I have also argued from a Christian point of view that the essence of being human is having the capacity to think -- to choose. You phrase it slightly differently, but the end result is similar.
I have asked my wife, a devout Catholic, whether a person who is braindead, but kept alive by artificial means, is "dead." She said yes. I asked, then, whether such a person still had a soul. She paused, and appeared confused. But in the end, the only conclusion one can draw is that the braindead person has no soul even though this is literally contrary to the teaching of the Catholic Church.
On the other end of affairs, then, can a fetus, which is clinically alive but incapable of thought because it has no brain, be considered to have a soul? I would say no, even though Catholic dogma is to the contrary. If a person has a soul, such a person can enter heaven. But how can a person that has no brain and never had a brain enter heaven? This is not a person.
Clearly, there is something dramatically wrong with Catholic dogma to the extent it states that the soul enters the body on conception.
But the end result of my thinking on this is that the fetus is not fully human until it has a brain and the capacity to think in some fashion. We believe humans develop brains at about 8 weeks, IIRC. I think abortion is OK prior to that time as it cannot be considered killing a human being.
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Boris Godunov
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Portland, OR
Aug 2001
time: 00:30
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quote:
Originally posted by beingofone
If someone wanted to end your life - I wonder if we would not hear a "blatant emotional appeal". |
Not if I were a fetus. What emotions did you have at that point?
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Yes there is proof that childbirth depression has induced trauma to women and men for thousands of years.
That is why we must stop it and stop it now. |
You've used this same line several times now, and even though I pointed out that it isn't making any sense, you persist in using it. I can only attribute it to your being unable to comprehend basic logic.
One last time: I am not anywhere arguing on banning a practice because there are risks associated with it. YOU are. So the above is only something YOU could logically come to, no me.
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Just because nazi experiments with Jews were "risky" doesn`t mean we did not gain, as a whole, major modern medical breakthroughs. |
 And we have Godwin invoked yet again. And an insult to the memory of Holocaust victims by a specious comparison to boot. 
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Just because I have emotion does not make me less intelligent or less human. In fact it makes me more, because I do not live in the denial that I experience emotion. |
Right, because I don't have emotion about the issue, I'm just an automaton. Oh, please.
It's not having emotion that's the problem, it's using emotional appeals as some sort of argument. Emotional appeals do NOT have any relevance to a logical argument. If you can't articulate why a practice is wrong without resorting to emotional pleas, then it's a bad argument.
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In certain cases I believe abortion should be allowed. I do not believe it is an alternative birth control method. |
So you accept that there are some cases wherein the best interest of the fetus is not the trump card--where the best interest of the mother can take precendent. If that's the case, then all the huffery and puffery about abortion being murder falls apart. If you accept these, then on principal you accept that the fetus is not fully human nor has the same rights as the human mother.
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Because ah um I knew her and you did not.
Common sense rather then listening to propoganda. |
Just because you knew her does not make you prescient. You have absolutely NO way of knowing what would have happened otherwise, it's just a guess on your part. One colored by your bias.
I can present you with several anecdotal tales of women who have had abortions and it has, in there opinion, been the right thing to do. One includes a friend of mine who had an abortion when she was 16. She's now been married for 15 years, has a great job and 2 kids and wants a third. She doesn't regret having the abortion, although she regrets being in the situation to have it. So she has 2 kids and a third planned that otherwise wouldn't be here. Where is your concern for those children, huh?
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47.9 % of ALL STATISTICS - are made up right on the spot. |
That's not an argument, and it's not even true. I'll take it you concede you have no actual evidence to support your claims. Concession granted.
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I see no reason why the mother if reasonably stressed out - should not have the right to end her childs life up to the age of say 15. |
Perhaps because there's a fundamental difference between a fetus inside a mother's womb and a conscious child outside of it? You seem to have a knack for dodging questions and just throwing out emotional strawmen like this. Why not try just answering questions instead? Can you?
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Because it would take up 4 forum pages. |
If you don't see fit to indulge us in the details, then you'll understand how the anecdotal claims don't carry a bit of weight in this debate. I asked you some specific questions and you just seem to be dodging/ignoring them.
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chegitz guevara
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Ft. Lauderdale, FL Communist Party of Apolyton
Jun 2000
time: 00:30
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quote:
Originally posted by beingofone
Just because nazi experiments with Jews were "risky" doesn`t mean we did not gain, as a whole, major modern medical breakthroughs. |
#1, you're an assh*le.
#2, the results of the Nazi experiments were sealed away, never to be opened. No medical breakthroughs have resulted from the "experiements" that were done on those poor people.
#3, by and large, there were no practical applications from the torture that Nazis performed. By and large they were simply gruesome torture, and not "legitmate" medical experiements. As a counter example I would point you in the direction of the "father of gynecology" who performed experiments on his female slaves. While inhuman and definately falling under the catagory of torture, some of what we know today about the female reproducitive system exists because of what that sick bastard did to those women.
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David Floyd
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The bottom of a large bottle of beer
Jan 1970
time: 05:30
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In the US, this would be a valid enough reason. That's the whole point of abortion on demand, that it shouldn't matter why you want one, the important thing is that you do. |
And you still haven't addressed my points, and you still haven't convincingly argued why this should be illegal.
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Ben Kenobi
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McGregornobi!
Oct 2002
time: 21:30
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Why suppose that at all? I don't suppose that any right supercedes any other right - I've already stated I don't believe in a hierarchy of rights, and as such I won't have hypothetical discussions about such hierarchies.
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Just because you reject a heirarchy of rights is not a good reason to reject the concept of one. Plenty of people do feel that this is a good way of classifying rights, and if you wish to convince people of the merits of your position, you ought to be able to come up with a rationale behind your rejection of heirarchical rights.
That you are unwilling to participate in a discussion of hierarchies, seems to me closeminded.
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I'm not dodging the point at all. For your hypothetical uber-fetus to have an accepted right to kill the abortion doctor to prevent an abortion, you first have to convince me that a)the fetus has rights, and b)the fetus has an inviolable claim on the mother's body. You've thus far failed to convince me of either.
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First of all, do you believe that people have the right to life, and as such, to exercise any of their other rights, they must first have the right to life? This is why people say that all other rights flow from the right to life, in that one cannot be free without being alive.
Secondly, my argument for the rights of an unborn child stem from the argument that they are persons, no different in that sense, from you or I. Even though their capabilities, and their accidents are much different, the substance remains unchanged.
You were once in your mother's womb, and I argue, you are the same person then, as you are now.
Finally, to say that one has the a right is not contigent upon your ability to exercise said right. If this were so, one could justify stripping away any right, such as freedom of speech, on the grounds that the people are incapable of putting the right to good use. If you believe rights are inherent, then I challenge you to find something inherently different between the unborn child, and an adult.
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Now you're trying to change the debate by stroking my emotions. Forget it - let's just assume that my precious gives a **** is broken and move on.
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The point is quite valid. You said, that unless all doctors agree it cannot be scientifically proved. I am saying that some doctors have a vested interest in doing abortions. Therefore, these vested interests supercede their medical integrity.
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To answer your point, such as it is, doctors have an obligation called the Hippocratic Oath, which the vast majority take seriously. Rather than assume they don't take it seriously because they perform abortions, I'm going to assume that abortions don't violate the Oath, which is the position most doctors would take. I'm further going to assume that in the face of valid medical evidence, MOST doctors would be willing to change their position.
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Actually, the Oath states that a doctor shall not procure abortifacients. This is the primary reason for revisions to the oath to make it more palatable to the physicians who perform, or agree with abortions. Rather than bending themselves around a professional code, they bend the code to suit themselves, to modernise the Hippocratic Oath.
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Now you're putting words in my mouth. I didn't say that violence was necessary in order to retain/regain freedom, only that it was POTENTIALLY necessary. Furthermore, you still haven't proved that a fetus has rights, nor have you proved that a fetus (actually, I liked my term "uber-fetus", it sorta captures what you seem to think a fetus is) has an inviolable claim on the mother's body. It seems to me that the burden of proof is on you in this case.
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I have attempted to prove this. That you reject the proofs, is not in any way indicative of the lack of proof provided. You are under no obligation to accept any proof that I provide. You can walk away from this, and deny every point that I make.
This is why, to make this worth my time, I ask that you are willing to be open to ideas that you have previously rejected for whatever reason, such as the primacy of the right to life, and why one cannot kill another person in order to justify bodily autonomy.
I have also attempted to show why the mother's bodily autonomy cannot justify an abortion. The child has a body, apart from the mother that gets hacked to bits, or poisoned in an abortion. Why should the rights of the mother automatically trump the rights of her child?
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Saying that conjoined Siamese twins is the same as allowing a terminally ill patient access to my body in order to survive is not a spot on analogy.
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No, but what happens afterwards is. Some Siamese twins are connected in such a way, that they are both dependent upon each other, and without the other, they would not survive.
Would one twin be justified in seperating himself from his twin, without the consent of the other? Why or why not?
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The original argument I made, and that you agreed to, was that I have no initial obligation to use my body to help someone else survive. I said nothing about dying in the process - if that was the end result, why all this talk about subsequently withdrawing aid? No, my point was that because I have no obligation to use my body to help someone else survive, then the right to life can't be at the top of any proposed hierarchy of rights. For life to be at the top, then I WOULD have an obligation to use my body in any way I could to help someone survive, unless it resulted in my death.
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I am saying that you do have this obligation provided that such actions do not risk your own life. Shouldn't be that hard a point to see. I am saying that in certain circumstances, you have interactions between your own right to life, and the right to life of another person, and in such situations you cannot be compelled to give up your life.
However, what I am saying, is that if you can save the life of another person, without risking your own, that you are obligated to take that action.
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In either of the latter cases, though, a lot of your arguments against abortion evaporate. You see the position you're in, when you get into discussing a hierarchy of rights?
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You haven't dealt with my point at all. I'd appreciate it if you did. It pertains to your argument, and addresses numerous objections down the line.
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Yet many pro-lifers, as well as the Catholic Church, would disagree with you.
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Do they? Where's your evidence that the Catholic church is in disagreement with me? In reality:
http://www.newadvent.org/cathen/01046b.htm
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However, if medical treatment or surgical operation, necessary to save a mother's life, is applied to her organism (though the child's death would, or at least might, follow as a regretted but unavoidable consequence), it should not be maintained that the fetal life is thereby directly attacked. Moralists agree that we are not always prohibited from doing what is lawful in itself, though evil consequences may follow which we do not desire. The good effects of our acts are then directly intended, and the regretted evil consequences are reluctantly permitted to follow because we cannot avoid them. The evil thus permitted is said to be indirectly intended. It is not imputed to us provided four conditions are verified, namely:
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I agree (and I did notice the fact that you keep trying to make the fetus more than what it is in an emotional appeal,
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Oh. What do you consider the fetus to be?
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The point I was making was that the mother has no obligation to donate blood to save her 2 year old daughter, so parental obligations have limits, and those limits stop at some point well before giving your life for your child.
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According to whom? I think she does have an obligation, and almost all mothers would not hesitate to trade their daughter's life for a few pints of their blood.
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So you believe that I don't have moral control over my own body? Morally speaking, it is acceptable for the government to mandate that everyone donate blood on a regular basis, for example?
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What the government requires cannot be what all of morality is. There is much that is moral, that should not be required by the government, because it could not be effectively regulated. This is just one of many. Sure, you have a moral obligation to donate blood, but the government cannot enforce such a requirement.
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Maybe the government can tell me that I have to donate one of my kidney's, to save the life of someone else. What about that?
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I suggest you read my post. I dealt with the kidney argument when I said that you cannot be morally obligated to save the life of another, if such an obligation risks your own. You may still do such an action, but such an action is considered to be supererogatory.
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That's rich, the person who came up with the concept of the "uber-fetus" that kills abortion doctors is accusing me of a lame analogy.
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It's an interesting question. How many abortion doctors would do them, if the unborn child could fight for her own life?
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You could, but most people would take put the priority on the adult rather than the fetus. Come to think of it, most doctors would, too.
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I would think the opposite. The child has a whole life ahead of her.
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That conclusion being that you don't think we have an obligation to provide as much care to a dying adult as we do to a fetus? Interesting argument.
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We do this all the time. Do we provide organs to those who are terminally ill? Why not? What I am trying to say here is that heroic measures to preserve the life of someone who is terminally ill, are treated differently from heroic measures to save someone who is healthy.
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Very good question. If the father doesn't want a child, and does everything in his power to prevent pregnancy, yet the mother obstinantly insists on having and keeping the baby, it seems to me that since she made a unilateral decision she should also have a unilateral responsibility.
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Why? Is not the child equally his?
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OK, change the word "save" to "sustain". Different word, same concept.
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Sustain. That's a much better case. In this question, we look at the norms. What is the usual situation for a child at this point in her life? The usual situation, is to gestate in the womb of her mother. That's quite a bit different then hooking someone up to a respirator to sustain their life.
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Very true - no amount of studies showing the dangers of cigarettes will convince me that we should ban cigarettes, either.
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What about laws restricting smoking? Shouldn't we be free to breathe fresh air, without inhaling the smoke of others, and getting cancer?
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21-01-2005 00:51
I just looked at Spiffor's last post
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