It depends on which societies you are looking at. Read Roe v. Wade a little closer. It mentions abortion was forbidden in the Persian Empire, and it discusses the ban on abortion in the Hippocratic Oath.
It depends on which societies you are looking at. Read Roe v. Wade a little closer. It mentions abortion was forbidden in the Persian Empire, and it discusses the ban on abortion in the Hippocratic Oath.
El Greco
Summer worshipper
- Joined
- Nov 11, 2003
- Messages
- 17,608
Because that person may feel that certain aspects of his morality are strictly personal, while others should govern the society in general. I may feel that cheating my wife is morally wrong, yet I don't think that this part of my morality should apply to the whole of the society I live in. Morality is one thing, legality is another.
My point was that when the U.S. was founded abortion was legal and completely non-controversial.
I was not referring to ancient Persia, The Assyrian Empire, early Etruscans, or tribes of nomadic Gypsies.
This part of your morality.
I think sooner or later, on either side of the law, it comes down to a personal decision that is not entirely based on science or reason. We are all hostage to our emotions to some degree.
People on both sides of this issue have said it is vital to overcome our emotions and think and act rationally. But let us not forget that some of us see abortion as nothing less than the murder of a human being. You will never convice us that we should overlook, trivialize, or legalize it.
The thing about pregnancy is that there is a wide variety of times when people consider the fetus to be a human being. At some point along the way, just about everyone comes to the belief that that is a human being in the womb and it is just plain wrong to murder it. Even most "pro-choice" people impose their morality on the mother by the third trimester, forcing her to carry the infant to term during the most dangerous time (to the mother) of a pregnancy. Regardless of how it will affect her finances or educational opportunities or whatever. It should not be difficult for pro-choice people who feel this way to at least understand how a pro-life person feels about the fetus at an earlier stage in the pregnancy, when the threat to the mother is minimal.
But for all our talk about the need to be rational, abortion topics always get overheated. Not just here, but everywhere in every household and public forum. And as a result, a workable, pragmatic, realistic solution, an opportunity, is lost. The one I keep plugging away at.
Pro-choice people who favor birth control education and pro-life people who favor birth control education make up an overwhelming majority. Overwhelming! So why is this opportunity constantly being sabotaged. Why can't we put aside our differences?
A mystery of human nature.
DavidJames
Penultimate Amazing
distinctions w/o a difference.There is a difference between "personally against smoking dope" and "smoking dope is wrong". For instance, I am personally against smoking dope for myself because I am a recovering alcoholic and must avoid all mind-altering substances, but I don't think smoking dope is wrong. From what I'm hearing, though, there are pro-choice people who think abortion is wrong. And I want to know why they think it is wrong.
ETA: If I thought smoking dope was wrong, I would favor laws against it.
I don't see the word "wrong" in there, either.
Wrong? Where is it?
Luke T. barely tolerant of liberals.
No mystery at all. Our government and the mass media like to keep us sniping at each other over trivia. Time tested method of distracting people from how f***ed up their rulers are.
I think abortion is wrong in the third trimester because the fetus has developed a sufficiently complex brain and nervous system to be distinctly human-like in some of its responses. I'd prefer to eliminate third trimester abortions for this reason, and even late second trimester abortions, just to be on the safe side. Four months is more than enough time to make that decision, even if it took a couple months for the pregnancy to be noticed. And the vast majority of abortions take place during the first trimester anyway.
I wouldn't say that first trimester abortion is "wrong," exactly, but I would still like to see it vastly reduced (I know that elimination is impractical). It's sometimes traumatic for the woman (and possibly her loved ones) and our current high number of abortions is indicative of irresponsible and self-destructive behavior. I suppose you could say I think first trimester abortions are wrong in the same sense that drug addiction is wrong: there may be no compelling ethical objection, but it's a bad thing sociologically.
That's my explanation. Now I'd like to request you return the favor, and explain why you think it's wrong to destroy a blastocyst or embryo or whatever the right term is when it's only a couple weeks old. If I recall my biology classes, at this point you can't really tell a human embryo from any other mammal embryo, except genetically. Is a group of cells with human DNA different in some critical way from a group of cells with, oh, cow DNA, which pretty much no one would object to destroying?
In short, I'd like a straight answer to the repeated question of whether you are opposed to abortion because you believe in something like a soul.
Jeremy
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mumblethrax
Species traitor
- Joined
- Apr 5, 2004
- Messages
- 5,016
It's interesting how linguistic conservatives will reliably conflate slang and lexical shift. The former is ephemeral by nature, the latter is a natural process that addresses the needs of the speakers of a language. It's also interesting how they invariably want to roll back language to the point when they first gained mastery and no earlier; nobody ever complains (anymore) about how language was corrupted between 1830 and 1860, for example.
The third thing linguistic conservatives unfailingly do is to invoke political correctness. With your examples, you might notice that nobody actually calls pump jockeys petroleum transfer engineers, but homeless has largely displaced bum. There's a good reason for that, of course. It might also interest you to know that homeless was first recorded in 1615.
Well, I'm not angry at all, but I do think your choice of terms betrays your inability to discuss the issue rationally.
To answer your question, it really is pro-choice. A Google search reveals 896,000 hits for pro-abortion (which will also catch all occurances of pro-abortion rights) and 3,290,000 for pro-choice. You might argue that pro-abortion is a more accurate label, but that would be absurd, since it doesn't represent the views of the pro-abortion rights crowd (this is also the reason you should avoid it in general). I've been to several pro-choice rallies and protests, and never have I heard, "What do we want? Abortions! When do we want them? Now!" chanted. I can count on the fingers of no hands the number of people I have met who are in favor of abortion in principle. Sorry, but it's an obviously dishonest label. By the same token, "anti-choice" is also a dishonest label, although a somewhat less absurd one.
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So for you, a fetus in the late second term and third trimester suddenly becomes entitled to human rights which trump a woman's privacy or future financial/career opportunities or potential health risks or matters of convenience.
I find your use of the phrase "just to be on the safe side" to be interesting, in a nice way.
I neither believe nor disbelieve in the notion of a soul. I followed the debates on materialism and mind and body and soul and quack quack quack in the R&P section of this forum for a long time and walked away more ambivalent than ever.
But I do believe you are a human being endowed with certain unalienable rights which a cow is not whether or not you have a soul. And not because your DNA is different from a cow's. Humans had rights superior to animals' before we even knew or heard of DNA.
I am also undecided/ambivalent on the aborting of a two week old fertilized egg. This only highlights my point that we all end up drawing an arbitrary line somewhere along the way, but it is a very fuzzy line few of us can actually point to and say "exactly this many days into the pregnancy". You yourself had a "just to be on the safe side" clause.
As Mark alluded to, even the Catholic Church couldn't make up its mind as to when a fetus was "animated" or imbued with a soul, and used the "quickening" (as proposed by Thomas Aquinas) as a convenient yardstick until the 19th century (not the 20th, Mark
).As Mark alluded to, even the Catholic Church couldn't make up its mind as to when a fetus was "animated" or imbued with a soul, and used the "quickening" (as proposed by Thomas Aquinas) as a convenient yardstick until the 19th century (not the 20th, Mark
My reference was to when abortion generally became illegal (mid 1800s), not to "Quickening" itself. Also to the fact that it was not religious leaders who pushed to make it illegal but rather the medical community. God didn't take an interest until the mid-late 20th century. Maybe He was out of town for a while.
I admit my writing my not have been clear.
Not suddenly, gradually. But the dividing line has to be drawn somewhere. While I have little doubt that an eight-month-old fetus is distinctly human, I also have little doubt that a clump of cells that hasn't even developed a nervous system, much less a brain, is just a clump of cells and doesn't feel a thing. My use of the phrase "just to be on the safe side" is intended to reflect the fuzziness of the area in between, and the desire to make sure our estimate of the critical point is conservative without going overboard.
I know what's coming next, of course: as long as we're playing it safe, why not play it extra safe and ban abortion altogether, at least in principle? Well, my answer is that allowing the government to interfere in our lives, and especially in our medical decisions, is not something that we should do casually. If it must be done, there should be a good reason for it, based on rational thinking and solid evidence. There is good evidence that a fetus near birth has human characteristics, but a two-month-old fetus does not really have any such features. The dividing line is fuzzy, but that doesn't mean that the fuzzy area extends all the way from one extreme to the other.
So we may not actually disagree on much besides the position of that blurry dividing line. I'm still curious, though, what basis you use for deciding humanity. Earlier you rejected criteria based on the fetus's stage of development (or did I misunderstand?), and now it seems that you also reject both supernatural and genetic criteria. I honestly am having a hard time pinning down what makes something "human" in your eyes.
Jeremy
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Roe v. Wade is not gospel, pun definitely intended.
edited to add source: http://slate.msn.com/id/1005956/
An interesting article to read, by the way, on the Jewish position on abortion.
Heh. You aren't the only one. I don't do this on purpose.
I guess I'm one of those "I know it when I see it" kind of guys.
I think part of the problem is the (often deliberate) use of emotionally-charged terms. Emotion is poison to any rational debate.
Calling abortion "murder" is one such instance. Murder is wrongful killing; it is not murder when you kill someone in self-defense, or by non-negligent accident.
And you yourself acknowledge that abortion may not always be wrongful, when you state that you are "undecided/ambivalent on the aborting of a two week old fertilized egg." If you truly believe it's murder, you should not be ambivalent; conversely, if you are ambivalent, you perforce have some doubts about whether it's murder.
Something I think almost all of us can agree on is that at some point, abortion becomes wrongful. I ran a poll on this some months back that bore me out on this; the problem was, we were all over the map on when it becomes wrongful.
Drawing that sharp, bright line between permissible killing and wrongful killing is the ugly part. I think the factor that weighs heaviest in most of our deciding that question is the amount of intelligence involved.
Nobody feels remorse when they yank a carrot out of the ground and throw it in the cookpot. The carrot has no intelligence. Very few of us feel remorse for the tuna that's going into our sandwich. Moving up the intelligence scale, however, we start to think about it. Significant numbers of people who would eat fish won't eat pigs or cattle. Why? What distinguishes a pig sitting on your plate from a fish? Intelligence. Why don't we eat dolphins? They're pretty easy to find, easy to breed, and I'm sure very nutritious. Is it because Flipper is one of the closest animals to us on the intelligence scale?
Meanwhile, we don't feel bad when grandpa dies after weeks in a coma or years suffering the ravages of Alzheimer's. There are even those who would "pull the plug" on him, with more sorrow than guilt, if it were legal. And when he does reach that stage, we often take no extraordinary measures to keep him alive, often at his earlier, explicit direction. Is it because there's no intelligence left in that body? Terri Schiavo was allowed to starve to death, and those who supported that course of action gave the rationale that her brain was so damaged that there was no intelligence left behind her eyes.
I think that's how most of us draw the line between abortion as permissible killing vs. abortion as wrongful killing. There's no doubt that a 34-week fetus is an intelligent being, learning faster than he or she will learn ever again. And there's also no doubt that a two-week old embryo has no intelligence yet.
Sorry this is so long. But if that isn't the explanation why most of us are opposed to 34-week abortions but not 2-week abortions, then I'd like to hear a better one.
Do you mind talking about it? I'm interested.
Earlier, you said:
Where do these rights come from? There seem to be three popular options: they derive from a supreme being, they derive from natural law (although I've never understood that one myself), or they are granted by the existing social structure. The fact that different cultures vary wildly on what rights people should enjoy makes me lean strongly toward the third.
Would you agree with any of those options, or is it something else?
Jeremy
I have no problem eating Flipper. I've eaten mahi-mahi, as a matter of fact. ETA: not exactly dolphin, but I would eat dolphin if it was on the menu.
Also, our labrador retriever was smarter than our kids all the way up through their first year of life, and maybe even past that point. A dolphin probably is, too.
Jeffrey Dhamer was capable of discussing murder and cannibalism with calm detachment. So what? Abandonment of ethics is considered a psychological problem in some cases, and this would likely be one of them.
It's easy to dispassionately discuss murder when you're on the side of it; witness A Modest Proposal for an example, which features similarly sanitized terms to help an otherwise grotesque position go down smoother.
Then try making one solid argument against murder in general without appealing to some sort of moral code. Good luck.
I lean toward option two. I am definitely not an option three kind of person.
This is a whole other topic we have discussed on here and could take up pages and pages. But I will say that all creatures are born with rights. A fox is born with the right to be a fox and hunt and kill his prey.
One of the reasons some people opposed a Bill of Rights was that it implied rights were granted (option three) and those rights not enumerated were not granted, that they had been taken away or could be taken away.
The difference between us and the fox is that you can tell a fox he can no longer kill his prey and he will kill his prey anyway.
If you tell a human he no longer has a right, you must give him a damn good reason to submit to the social contract.
I agree with you that it's usually a mistake to try to get rid of ethics, but it's not always impossible.
You can make a good case for banning murder on sociological grounds: societies that don't do it are not stable and won't survive. Does thinking that survival of our species is a good thing count as a moral code? I'd call it more of an axiom, especially since it's probably hard-wired in our biology.
Jeremy