America transitions into Gilead

[Ziggurat]

Some "choices"!
1. carrying to term against her wishes
2. committing suicide
3. endangering her life with a botched, illegal abortion
4. endangering her future ability to have children from a botched abortion

Yep, women will really have some great options there!

Nobody claimed the choices would be considered satisfactory to her. But they are still choices.

I wonder how you'd feel if you ever had to face an unwanted pregnancy at 12, 13, or 14 years old after being raped by daddy and then kicked out of the house when mommy doesn't believe you. Oh, wait...you'll never face that, will you? It's easy to tell others what to do and get on your moral high ground when it's all just something you'll never face.

Like I already said, a relative of mine DID face that. She WAS raped by her father. Her mother had died in a car accident, so belief wasn't relevant. She DID have an abortion. And guess what: it didn't protect her. It enabled her father to continue to rape her, for years. And it eventually drove her to suicide.

I know why people in that situation would want an abortion. But that doesn't mean it will necessarily help, at all.

 

[Stacyhs]

Nobody claimed the choices would be considered satisfactory to her. But they are still choices.

SATISFACTORY? These kinds of 'choices' have a name: Sophie's Choice.

Like I already said, a relative of mine DID face that. She WAS raped by her father. Her mother had died in a car accident, so belief wasn't relevant. She DID have an abortion. And guess what: it didn't protect her. It enabled her father to continue to rape her, for years. And it eventually drove her to suicide.

A relative is not YOU. As I said, YOU will never face this.

An abortion isn't meant to PROTECT anyone from rape. And if she'd given birth to that child and given it up for adoption, do you think her father wouldn't have continued to rape her? And she would likely still have committed suicide.

I know why people in that situation would want an abortion. But that doesn't mean it will necessarily help, at all.

But it has helped many, many girls and women. But that should be their decision, not yours or some middle aged/old men sitting in a room more concerned with getting re-elected than anything else.

 

[theprestige]

Some "choices"!

1. carrying to term against her wishes

2. committing suicide

3. endangering her life with a botched, illegal abortion

4. endangering her future ability to have children from a botched abortion



Yep, women will really have some great options there!



I wonder how you'd feel if you ever had to face an unwanted pregnancy at 12, 13, or 14 years old after being raped by daddy and then kicked out of the house when mommy doesn't believe you. Oh, wait...you'll never face that, will you? It's easy to tell others what to do and get on your moral high ground when it's all just something you'll never face.

I count at least five options now.

 

[Stacyhs]

I count at least five options now.

Now I know how Trump's advisors feel when they try to educate him on something.

 

[Puppycow]

Abused 12-Year-Old Alabama Girl Doesn’t Think She Can Handle Being A Mom On Top Of Everything Else

 

[Minoosh]

If you're drowning and I try to save you, I don't get to change my mind halfway through because the physical burden is too inconvenient.

Of course you get to do that. I don't know of any public-safety advice that says you should ignore considerations of your own safety in trying to rescue someone else.

A firefighter doesn't get to opt out of carrying people from a burning building because "lol people are heavy".

Can you cite where women getting abortions are texting "lol" to their friends? Perhaps that's a literary flourish you allowed yourself.

Then there's all the idiots who think they want to breed, and then change their mind halfway through. Or who kept meaning to reverse the reversal but never get around to it, and go on having sex anyway.

So what if they're idiots?

Even in a world of condoms, easy-access birth control, and the old standby of abstinence, we still seem to need abortions of convenience on the regular. I don't think foolproof technology is going to be the right answer for solving human problems.

OK, I'll bite: what's the right answer?

 

[dudalb]

"Hey I don't care if a Woman's basic rights are taken away as long as I get my Tax cuts".

 

[Roger Ramjets]

How do you prove that is what murder assumes? For many it is based on the assumed presence of a soul.

Murder

is the unlawful killing of another human without justification or valid excuse

Doesn't matter what someone assumes, if it's legal then it's not murder.

But hey, what if the 'presence of a soul' was the criteria for murder? Could be tricky since the prosecution would have to prove that the victim had one! And it would be open season on Atheists and liberals (aka Communists) since we all know they don't have souls.

 

[The_Animus]

The reasoning is not difficult. Some believe that the fact that a being will become a full-fledged person if allowed to develop naturally entails that the being deserves the rights of a person now. In fact, that's an easier position to defend than the pro-choice position, since conception is an obvious point where something big has changed.

Everyone agrees (almost everyone) that killing an infant is bad. Most agree that it is just as bad as killing a normal adult human. Almost everyone agrees that preventing a fetus from forming is not morally the same as murder (even the Catholic church, which regards contraception as wrong, does not view contraception as murder). So, at some point at or after fertilization and before birth, this lump of cells must become a thing with rights. The question is when. Conception itself is a natural choice. Other times can be selected, but it's a more difficult task to explain why it's that moment when the fetus starts to matter. (Having a heartbeat, for instance, is a pretty obviously stupid point to claim is the origin of moral considerability.)

There is the related problem that any other time is harder to pinpoint. Singer, for instance, ties moral considerability to the ability to feel pain (I'm not saying he thinks abortion is wrong once this occurs -- his position is nuanced and it's not clear to me what his views on abortion are). But it's not clear when the ability to feel pain occurs. What change occurs so that, the day before, the fetus couldn't feel pain and the day after, it can? I'm not even talking about the problem of measuring which fetuses can feel pain, since they develop at different rates, but whether there's really some specifiable time when feeling pain is suddenly a capacity or, if it develops gradually, the time at which the capacity has developed enough to matter.

So, while I don't agree with the pro-life position, I understand it fairly well and don't think it's a stupid position to take nor that pro-lifers are motivated by misogynism. (I'm sure some are, but some people are just bad people.)

This is obviously a question that everyone with an opinion on abortion must answer, not just the pro-life camp. Why, indeed, is the living thing before viability or birth or the second trimester or whatever okay to kill but the living thing after that not okay?

Nimble's going to have a hard time defending his admittedly speciesist position and even that doesn't really entail his position on abortion, but others need to realize that the onus isn't on him. We all share it, so long as we have an opinion.

I find the abortion question a tough nut. I tend to think that abortion is acceptable in most circumstances, but I also recognize that I don't have an argument that I find anywhere near satisfactory.

I think your posts do a great job of capturing the essence of the debate and the difficulty in determining a point at which to consider it alive.

I disregard any religious arguments because of the obvious problem with laws being predicated on religious beliefs. I'm not a fan of the argument that it counts as life at conception just because it has the potential to become a person. It still requires many steps before it becomes a person and in vitro fertilized eggs or even sperm has the same potential it just takes an extra step or two. I can understand the argument, but I don't feel it's a strong one. Pleading humans as a special case separate from animals because of self-awareness or intelligence doesn't really work for me either. It feels too similar to the religious soul argument and to various extents it can be argued that animals display self-awareness and intelligence.

Even if we don't plead a special case for humans and were to base it off of something like the ability to feel pain or self-awareness, what is the argument for why it is okay to kill animals whether for sport or food or we deem them an annoyance. Nimble, the poster I originally responded to said (paraphrase) abortions are usually killing for the sake of convenience. That's why I asked if they were vegan. Killing for sport or for food or because they are deemed an annoyance is also killing for the sake of convenience.

As you put it, the abortion question is a tough nut. It's hard to find arguments whether for or against that have consistency when applied to other facets of life. There doesn't seem to be an absolute answer as to where the line should be drawn. The pain argument makes the most sense to me. From what I've read fetuses can feel pain sometime between 8-16 weeks after conception and so after that there would be restrictions on abortions except in special cases.

 

[Ziggurat]

An abortion isn't meant to PROTECT anyone from rape. And if she'd given birth to that child and given it up for adoption, do you think her father wouldn't have continued to rape her?

Quite possibly not. The baby would have been proof of the rape.

But it has helped many, many girls and women. But that should be their decision, not yours or some middle aged/old men sitting in a room more concerned with getting re-elected than anything else.

It wasn’t her decision. It was his.

 

[theprestige]

"Hey I don't care if a Woman's basic rights are taken away as long as I get my Tax cuts".

I would say that the right to life is basic.

I would say that the right to choose whether some other life continues is not basic at all, but rather complex and debatable.

And of course neither has anything to do with tax cuts. Do you have an honest argument about life and human rights?

 

[JoeMorgue]

Wow. I'm actually adding "A 12 year old rape victim being forced to carry to term is a BAD THING" to the list of things I've managed to find people to be contrarian over.

 

[phiwum]

An argument based on "potential" is a weak argument. Depriving a potential person of "a future like ours" sounds like another version of the potential argument. And killing an adult or a child is wrong for reasons besides those. That's not the only reason why killing is wrong.

Forcing a woman (say a rape victim) or girl to become a single mother also deprives her of "a future like ours". You've taken away 20 years of her life. Anyone who feels so strongly about this that they would deny abortion to a rape victim or a single woman in a difficult situation should prove it by "putting their money where their mouth is" so to speak and adopting a child or two. If you're not willing to take on that burden yourself, then you have no right to impose that burden on someone else.

I don't want to defend Marquis, but I have an idea how he would respond. He actually explicitly responds to the potentiality objection you raise, but I'd just as soon skip that as a bit abstruse.

For the second, yes, certainly, the single mother has lost some of the future enjoyable experiences she otherwise would have had. The fetus (or the victim of a murder) would lose not merely some of their future like ours, but its entirety. This is worse. Hence, one cannot defend abortion on the grounds that it preserves the woman's future since the cost to the other party is much worse.

By the way, Marquis chickens out at the beginning of the article and explicitly omits pregnancy due to rape from the discussion. I think this is intellectual cowardice on his part, since his argument applies equally well to that case. If he had the courage of his convictions, he would say that abortion is wrong even in that case, seems to me.

 

[Minoosh]

Leaving logic cleanly behind I find that forcing a girl/woman to carry a fetus to term is more horrifying to me than allowing women the right to end their pregnancies.

On the one hand: A right that has been legal for decades, is legal in other advanced countries, was legal under common law for hundreds of years and is not rigorously proscribed by many religions can continue to exist.

The state does not have a compelling enough case to justify such a step backward.

And not to hold the woman criminally liable? Makes no sense whatsoever. Punish the hit man, but not who ordered the hit. Horrible legislation.

 

[phiwum]

I think your posts do a great job of capturing the essence of the debate and the difficulty in determining a point at which to consider it alive.

I disregard any religious arguments because of the obvious problem with laws being predicated on religious beliefs. I'm not a fan of the argument that it counts as life at conception just because it has the potential to become a person. It still requires many steps before it becomes a person and in vitro fertilized eggs or even sperm has the same potential it just takes an extra step or two. I can understand the argument, but I don't feel it's a strong one. Pleading humans as a special case separate from animals because of self-awareness or intelligence doesn't really work for me either. It feels too similar to the religious soul argument and to various extents it can be argued that animals display self-awareness and intelligence.

Even if we don't plead a special case for humans and were to base it off of something like the ability to feel pain or self-awareness, what is the argument for why it is okay to kill animals whether for sport or food or we deem them an annoyance. Nimble, the poster I originally responded to said (paraphrase) abortions are usually killing for the sake of convenience. That's why I asked if they were vegan. Killing for sport or for food or because they are deemed an annoyance is also killing for the sake of convenience.

As you put it, the abortion question is a tough nut. It's hard to find arguments whether for or against that have consistency when applied to other facets of life. There doesn't seem to be an absolute answer as to where the line should be drawn. The pain argument makes the most sense to me. From what I've read fetuses can feel pain sometime between 8-16 weeks after conception and so after that there would be restrictions on abortions except in special cases.

The pain argument (ability to feel pleasure and pain is called sentience in philosophical circles, a bit different than the usual definition of sentience) is famously defended by Singer. I don't know if he ever applied it explicitly to the abortion debate and he regarded the question of whether it's okay to kill animals more difficult than the question of whether it's okay to hurt them. I've read the article a few times and still find his conclusion on killing hard to pin down.

One article he wrote on this is called "All Animals Are Equal". (If it's really an excerpt rather than an article, you might not find it under that name. Let me know.) It's an easy read. The biggest annoyance is the amount of time he spends on arguing that animals can feel pain, something that seems obvious to me. Perhaps that was less widely accepted at the time he wrote that article, but I kinda find that hard to believe.

Thanks for your kind remarks.

 

[phiwum]

And not to hold the woman criminally liable? Makes no sense whatsoever. Punish the hit man, but not who ordered the hit. Horrible legislation.

I believe I agree. If abortion is like murder, then surely the woman ought to be prosecuted as well as the doctor, at least if it's an elective abortion of a pregnancy due to consensual intercourse and the woman was in a position to make a competent and informed decision. This inconsistency is surely motivated by political considerations.

 

[Minoosh]

I believe I agree. If abortion is like murder, then surely the woman ought to be prosecuted as well as the doctor, at least if it's an elective abortion of a pregnancy due to consensual intercourse and the woman was in a position to make a competent and informed decision. This inconsistency is surely motivated by political considerations.

It makes sense, if you posit that women do not have agency in the matter.

 

[Puppycow]

For the second, yes, certainly, the single mother has lost some of the future enjoyable experiences she otherwise would have had. The fetus (or the victim of a murder) would lose not merely some of their future like ours, but its entirety. This is worse. Hence, one cannot defend abortion on the grounds that it preserves the woman's future since the cost to the other party is much worse.

Reducing the entire moral equation down to hypothetical possible futures ignores too many other reasons why murder is wrong. If you murder an adult human, that person is already an actual fully formed human being, not a fertilized egg that is programmed to grow into one in the future. The human being almost certainly has a family, friends, perhaps dependent children and/or colleagues, all of whom will be impacted by their loss. Nobody is going to miss that zygote in the same way or have their life altered because some person who hadn't been born yet in any case isn't born. Certainly not more than its mother.

So murder is not wrong solely because it deprives a person of "a future like ours" but for many other reasons as well that do not apply to a fetus.

 

[BobTheCoward]

For the pro choice side...

Do you have an argument that the "abortion is murder" side hasn't heard yet? If not, why even discuss the subject with them?

 

[Puppycow]

I had another thought about this:

A better argument is Marquis's argument . . .
The article is titled "An Argument that Abortion is Wrong".

Getting into an argument about this was probably a mistake because "whether abortion is right or wrong" isn't actually the right question to ask. At least it isn't the primary question that I'm concerned with. It's "whether abortion should be illegal or legal and under what circumstances". Even if, for the sake of argument, Marquis is correct that "Abortion is Wrong" as a metaphysical matter, the question remains as a separate legitimate question of public and social policy. Because there are other wrongs and considerations to balance it against. What is in the overall best interest of society as a whole?