The Abortion Debate Containment Thread - Put abortion sperging here.

Why are you morally comfortable with the concept of deciding which lives have priority over others? I am not. No one should decide such things.
Because sentient beings should be the top priority.
 
Human beings should not be prioritized or de-prioritized. All are equal. No one may ever violate the rights of another under any circumstances. It is not a matter of comparing bad with worse. It is never.
Sorry, can't hyperlink for some reason

This (https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipe...pg/1200px-Embryo_7_weeks_after_conception.jpg) is not on the same level as an already born person. Period.

I have a tangentially related question for you: do you support embryonic stem cell research?
 
Your analogy would work if they weren't a prisoner and you did nothing to them and are three thousand miles away and don't even know their name. Then, yes, that's not murder.
Except that analogy no longer fits. I cannot be held accountable for someone starving to death thousands of miles away, whereas a person in charge of a prison absolutely can be held accountable for allowing one of their prisoners to starve to death. A prison supervisor is responsible for the welfare of their prisoners, just as a society which prevents a woman from having an abortion is responsible for her pregnancy coming to term. All I am asking is for you to own up to that responsibility, and I think it's very telling that you're apparently so reluctant to.
Your natural future is a part of you, which is why the fetus is a person from the instant it exists. If it exists, it is what it is. The present is not all that exists. Murder is stealing this natural future from someone.
If we're going to dispense with any distinction between potentiality and actuality, why draw the line at conception? Does a sperm cell not possess just as much potential to become a person as a zygote, theoretically? Should we consider masturbation to be an act of genocide? I've already given you a qualitative explanation of what I think best defines personhood, and I've not seen you present any refutation. By contrast, I've explained in some detail the various reasons I reject your view.
There are no grey areas anywhere in the universe. Nuance only appears when you do not understand something or are being willfully obtuse.
Right down to our physical and mathematical laws there are grey areas. Ever heard of an irrational number, or quantum superposition?
You do not actually disagree, you are pretending to because you are unwilling to simply say your real position: You are evil, do not care that you are murdering a baby, and want to do it anyway.
Now who's arguing in bad faith?
Rights are rights are rights are rights.
So tell me, do you think that children should have access to all of the same rights that adults do?
 
I cannot be held accountable for someone starving to death thousands of miles away, whereas a person in charge of a prison absolutely can be held accountable for allowing one of their prisoners to starve to death.
That's my point. I'm not her supervisor. I don't even know her name. I am thousands of miles away.
All I am asking is for you to own up to that responsibility, and I think it's very telling that you're apparently so reluctant to.
No such responsibility exists. There is no reluctance about it, only refusal.
If we're going to dispense with any distinction between potentiality and actuality,
We aren't. It is not a potential human, it is a human.
A human being is not a thing that exists at a single point in time. A human being is a caterpillar, stretching from the where and when of its conception to the where and when of its death. It is a process, which stretches across time. It exists at all points along that timeline, from beginning to end, and it is itself at all points as well. There is nothing "potential" about it.
Right down to our physical and mathematical laws there are grey areas. Ever heard of an irrational number, or quantum superposition?
Bunch of nonsense.
Now who's arguing in bad faith?
You.
 
It is her body upon which the pregnancy depends, and if she is not able to govern it, she has no autonomy in the situation.
But she's almost certainly brought in another person to perform the abortion. What about the self governance of the doctor? Forget the fetus-- you can't talk self governance when there's at bare minimum two parties involved and one of them is actually performing the abortion. If we're worried about "self-governance", we can strictly legalize DIY abortions and that'll be the end of that.
I've already explained why DNA is insufficient to define what it means to be a human being. Identical twins have identical DNA, yet this clearly doesn't mean that they are the same person.
But they're nonetheless distinct existences from the parents because of their DNA, and thus cannot be considered mere extensions of the mother. The fact that they have human DNA, and are generally capable of growth into a more mature human being, substantiates their humanity.

Similarly, if someone was to undergo some kind of radical genetical mutation, they wouldn't suddenly become someone else.
If, perchance, someone had undergone a massive genetic mutation that changed the DNA in every cell, they would be a different person. Actually, this thought experiment is undercooked-- what do you imagine the consequences of changing the DNA in every cell of a single person would be on their body, psyche, and the developmental trajectories of the aforementioned?

Our DNA is not what defines us as people, our individual conscious experience and identity does
You can very well argue whether someone that isn't you has either of those things-- for example, African slaves were considered subhuman in order to justify their enslavement in America when slavery became fashionable again but people had come to understand that "all men are created equal" includes... all men. They came up with a variety of arguments in order to assuage their cognitive dissonance, but it really is as simple as not regarding a human being as a human being. You can't argue with biology and ontology the same way-- you can't call a banana a dolphin because... well, a banana doesn't look like a dolphin, it doesn't have dolphin DNA (and thus it is never destined to grow into a dolphin), and at no point in a banana's evolution is a dolphin ever involved.

Identity, furthermore, is more fundamental than you're making it to be. Identity is as simple as defining a separate existence. A fetus is dependent on the mother, certainly, but that doesn't make it of the same existence of the mother.

Conscious experience certainly does factor into the definition of a human identity, but at the foundation of what defines a human must lie immutable, undeniable factors-- even without awareness of DNA, you can mate with another human being and produce offspring that are undeniably human. Everyone in that occurrence, therefore, must be of the same kind, and furthermore, they must have always been of the same kind.

The difference is that someone who is asleep is already a human being. They're not a potential person, since their potential has clearly been realized.
Actually, their potential has yet to be realized since they have yet to reach maturity. You speak elsewhere of children being less cognitively developed than adults, but the developmental difference is global-- they're less developed in every single capacity. Given that assertion of yours, the blind spot of this assertion, and your belief that "conscious experience and identity" (rather than biology and ontology, with or without "conscious experience and identity") leads me to believe that you take a rather "mentalized" approach is evaluating human life.
 
  • Agree
Reactions: madethistocomment
Identity, furthermore, is more fundamental than you're making it to be. Identity is as simple as defining a separate existence. A fetus is dependent on the mother, certainly, but that doesn't make it of the same existence of the mother.
Precisely. None of its features matter except that it
1. Exists
2. Isn't its mother or its father
3. Is therefore itself
Actually, their potential has yet to be realized since they have yet to reach maturity. You speak elsewhere of children being less cognitively developed than adults, but the developmental difference is global-- they're less developed in every single capacity. Given that assertion of yours, the blind spot of this assertion, and your belief that "conscious experience and identity" (rather than biology and ontology, with or without "conscious experience and identity") leads me to believe that you take a rather "mentalized" approach is evaluating human life.
All of their "potential human being, not an actual human being" arguments logically also make it okay to murder anyone under 25. When you bring this up they change the subject or ignore it.

These people have no philosophy, no theology, no argumentative logic, no anything. All they have is their feelings. Murder is wrong because it feels bad, or because it makes surviving family members feel bad. Neither of those are true of Abortion, so they have no means by which to condemn abortion, so they are fine with it. This is the most robust reasoning they can possibly muster, because all the tools required to say anything more substantial are not in their mental toolbelt. Morally bad? Rights? Impermissible? What does that even mean?

Atheist secularism and morality are mutually exclusive. The former has no means to derive the latter. What morality they can muster is always merely the remnants of the traditional society they live parasitically off of, until all of its mores have dissolved.
 
I love reading Reddit comments because they have no idea how case and controversy works, let alone the broad points of the legals system.

Even if Republicans in every state started conspiring to bring forth cases that would ban abortion forever, it would still probably take them half a decade to even reach SCOTUS.
Reversing Roe v Wade would not ban abortion anyway. It would go to the states. Nowhere any ivory tower harpy would want to live would see any changes at all.
 
^the same guy that is going to whine about the "sanctity of life" in another thread.

i rest spenda as "splenda" xD
I referred to the sanctity of innocent life. Commies and abortionists are anything but innocent. They make a continual choice tobe evil degenerates, and thus forfeit their humanity.
 
Back