I was not putting words into anyone's mouth, no I was merely working out the moral logic of the argument. That's all.

In a way the argument of abortions in case of rape, no abortions except on the immediate threat to mother's life clause and legalised abortions, is actually a litmus test of moral criteria. If you base your moral system on a concrete (and most likely inflexable) set of laws then you will oppose abortion even in cases of rape. If you base your morality on emotion and concrete laws then you will probably allow abortion in cases of rape.

Noone has the right to arbiterily decide on the basis of any criteria to kill another human it is simply not morally acceptable behavior. Choice is irrelevant in this matter, given that all you are basicly meaning by "choice" is the entitlement to do the above. The entire apparatus of state and law has as it's first and foremost duty to protect innocent human life from bieng arbiterily slain by other humans. This is the first duty of the state, and stands above all it's other duties. To protect innocent human life is substantially more important that protecting private liberties, if they conflict with the above then the above takes precedence. Hence abortion should be illiegal according to the first principle. The only basis for arguing for legalised abortion would be the following.

1. The fetus does not constitute a human.
2. The fetus poses an immediate and direct threat to the life of another person, ie the mother.
3. The right of individuals to make their own choices is more important than the right of individuals not to arbiterily slain by others.

The human fetus is human, it has human DNA, descends from humans and develops as a human, therefore it is not any other kind of creature. Thereby the first argument cannot stand. Usually when the fetus poses a direct threat to the mothers life (such as in an ectopic pregnancy) it also poses a direct threat to own life, therefore by aborting the fetus you are minimising loss of life, by killing only one human rather than allowing two to die.
The third argument is not a code of law that any sane society can either believe in or operate under, by this logic murder at large should be legal also and for people to try to try to defend themselves against getting murdered is a crime, beacause you are defying the right of individuals to kill, unless you intend to kill the murderer rather than intend merely to avoid getting killed.

The circumstances of the fetus's conception makes no difference whatsoever to the situation as someone cannot reasonably be punished for something their father did unless your society believes in hereditery guilt and the penalty for rape is death.

Thus concludes my case for making abortion illiegal.

So, are you going to strive to make periods illegal? After all, millions of lives are ending every month because of that.

A little off-topic...

Slayer of Cliffracers, just out of curiosity, what is your opinion on capital punishment?

What!?!

that would be like making hurricanes illegal and is no analogy to abortion in any way. (unless I just totally missed something.) Can I get an explanation?

Like Dantrag said, it's not something that can be controlled, or is that what he said?

Abortion is a choice, having a hurricane destroy your house isn't.

This post has been edited by gamer10: Aug 3 2005, 05:47 PM

I'm not in favor of capital punishment, no. In my country (the UK) it isn't practiced and I wouldn't agree with it even if it was.

agreed. it's legal here in the netherlands, and I'm glad it is. say I get a girlfriend one day (yes yes I know, about as likely to happen as hell freezing over, but bear with me here )

and we mess things up and in the morning she's pregnant. I don't think I'd be ready for a child at this young age. can you imagine the same situation for someone that's 14 and tries to do some experimenting?

it's not fair to force someone to ruin their life for a mistake. yes it's your own responsibility, and yes everyone should pay attention as closely as possible to prevent something like this happening. still my point stands.





comparing the third reich, holocaust and all to abortion doesn't sound like a good idea to be honest. it's also quite inaccurate IMO




:nono:

no going off topic star

So the child is somehow less human than the mother? You speak of ruining the mother's life, but nothing is said of the child that was murdered. Your rights end when they step over mine. Same concept with abortion. Why is the mother's right to live so much more important than the baby's? Because they are a different age? Size? Sounds an awful lot like discrimination to me.

I voted illegal unless a girl is raped.

I think abortion should be illegal, sorry those of you that have different opinions...Alex, I don't think people should be "experimenting" at the age of 14 I think if people are willing to experiment they should be willing to pay the price.

The only time I think abortion is justified is in the case of rape, when a girl is sexually assaulted I don't think she should be forced to conceive a child, just the way I feel about it.

It is my belief though that a woman shouldn't have a child aborted unless she is raped, otherwise it seems to me that a life is being taken. Many talk of how a girl's life could be ruined by having a child...but who is to decide that the child's life is not important?

It would seem to me that the child isn't being given a chance at life, which is in a sense murder. There's my opinion.

Why shouldn't we compare abortion and the Nazi "final solution". Abortion is kind of the final solution to the "unwanted baby problem" set down to pave the way for the glorious age when "every child is a wanted child". Both effect a segmant of the human race that has been selected on some criteria and both are supported and sanctioned by the state, which naturally draws a distinction between what it does and murder on the basis of this criteria. The criteria is................
1. Bieng under a certain age
2. Not bieng wanted by your mother.

The only real difference is the fact that abortion, unlike the Nazi "final solution" is de-centralised mass-murder, organised by ordinery citizens and ground level and not directly orginised by the state though supported by it(with the exception of China with it's enforced 1 child policy). It's kind of emotive to put it in these terms, but even the rhetoric of abortion is eerily similer to the rhetoric of the Nazi's in many ways, the main difference is that they've substituted "glorious racial destiny" for "women's right to choose", in other words those that oppose abortion oppose "women's glorious destiny" in effect.

People make mistakes, so what? Does it somehow invalidate the fetus's right to life just beacause it's parents were stupid, no it doesn't. And for all we know the babies life wouldn't necceserily be complete hell, it's parents lives will be but then I guess that's babies for you . People should be helped to raise the children they concieved out of stupidity and taught responsibility, not helped to kill them, before bieng sent out into the world once more to make the same mistake once-more.

well I guess my viw differs somewhat. I think when the child isn't even a child yet, but no more then an embryo. not selfaware. in those cases I think Abortion should be allowed yes.

yes you are preventing a life from developing by this abortion, but I think the alternative might be worse.
unwanted children have a tendency to be neglected or even put up for adoption, or abused. and more.

which isn't even always just the case with unwanted children.

I went through an abortion with an old girlfriend. She was officially barren (98.8% in fact) due to polyscistic (sp) ovaries. However, she became pregnant through some absolute fluke and we decided to abort. It was a simply that we were too young to be responsible for a child, we did not have monetary support needed to support the 3 of us and to top it off our lives were fairly seperate as we lived around 80 miles from each other.

It was not murder. I'm an ethical person. But it never crossed my mind that what we had to do was killing a person. It was not a person. Granted you can argue til you are blue in the face that it was wrong, but on that same note, you should illegalise contraception as well, as that it preventing life from being created through the process of reproduction. I do not regret the abortion. Why? Because my ex now knows she CAN have children. That it is not impossible, and that a child was not brought into the world in circumstances that would have made its upbringing incredibly tough, as well as flawed.

That unwanted children have a tendancy to have a bad time is clearly not a good thing, but surely the responsability for this lies on the heads of society (ie us all as a corporate group). Abortion does not solve the underlying problems with society that
a) deems some children unwanted
punishes them for it directly or inderectly.
c) fails to support them.

Abortion may elimate through violance a large number of unwanted children, but it doesn't solve the underlying problems, indeed it even helps to reinforce them, by offlaying the consequences. You're "solving" the symptoms without the causes. If people are encouraged to think in terms of wanted and unwanted children which any society that practices abortion does, then you're actually creating large numbers unwanted children, which are then summererily disposed of. The crisis of large numbers of unwanted children, though unpleasant in the short term, both for the children concerned and society at large, with ultimately force society to confront the root problems that created them in the first place. It's effectively sweeping the problem under the carpet rather than confronting it.

Why does self-awareness matter? If you're going to base you're concept of whether ending a human life is murder or not on whether they are presently self-aware (which is what you're doing) then everyone that is asleep can be slain with legal immunity (with exception of people that are currently dreaming) as due to the fact that the sleeping human lacks self-awareness, killing them is not murder.

Furthermore it cannot be determined by scientific means at what point "self awareness" actually developed as the concept is almost entirely subjective, and we cannot determine the exact point at which it begins, or even which animals are self-aware or not. So it would be impossable to determine the exact age up to which abortion is allowed along this basis, since you cannot judge self-awareness. All you're left with is an incoherent system I'll call "fluffy bunny morality" where you base everything on emotional reactions based on appearance. So if it looks like a "cute human baby" then we get all mushy and pass laws to protect it, while if it looks like a wierd alien sea creature or a spherical blob of cells then we kill them. No matter that the cute human baby is simply a larger "wierd alien sea creature" or "blob of cells" in a different shaps. Indeed pysically all of us are simply immensely enlarged blobs of cells in a humanoid shape anyway.

This post has been edited by Slayer of Cliffracers: Aug 4 2005, 01:11 PM

Darkwing, money is not an excuse to kill. You can't kill other humans on the basis of financial incoveniance and difficulty. You hurt my wallet, so die. You're life isn't going to be as brilliant as the next person, so I guess you'll have to die. The ethical logic is pretty dispicable in my opinion. You can quite easily apply that logic to all sort of situations where people are financially dependant.

Where did you get the idea I opposed contraception from? Both the sperm and the eggs are cells derogative from the mother and father respectably and their death doesn't kill the organism from which they derive. Same as skin cells are discarded every day, they do not constitute a human life in themselves, unless you create a clone out of them I guess. In the right conditions they combine their DNA and "declare indedendance" of their source entities and begin to grow as such. The only logical point to say each human life begins is a conception. Hence what goes on before conception is in the context of this debate irrelevant. This is a debate about the ethics of abortion, not those of contraception.

Its extremely easy to take the moral high ground on something that seems so black and white that its obvious. Unfortunately it is absolutely not black and white and is far from obvious.

Simplifying it with a 'oh you cost money so we'll have to kill you' is incredibly insulting as well as naive considering we were not putting ourselves first. We knew that no matter what we did, the child's life was going to be miserable. What right did we have to have a child knowing its life would be troubled from the offset. I do not agree that its a 'life' from conception. It is simply a combination of elements that grow to create life. At the time of abortion, it was not a child. Saying that because its not some other species and therefore it must be human is clearly flawed as it is still in dispute. If it was so cut and dried, then it would be illegal and it would be murder.

That's a sad story, Dark, and I'm sorry you had to go through that.

Slayer of Cliffracers- What an astonishing thing to say. This is very much like the pro-life crowd, you care about the child until it's born, then it's all right if it's parents don't have much money. Would you rather the child be brought into the world, then put in a homeless shelter, or given to a foster family?

somehow you (slayer) make it sound like if every country would legalise it, then we would have as many abortion clinics as we have banks now, one on every corner.

I think you're thinking way too easily on this. and Dw's example might be the perfect one. and could be compared to many others, people don't do that with a light heart, they don't choose to abort a child with a light heart, nor does someone choose to have a baby on a light heart,

something as monumental and significant as this (getting a child I mean), should be well thought of before you do it. and if a child is conceived because of an accident, then what's worse? letting it grow up with unloving parents and letting it suffer simply for being, or aborting it and sparing it of all of that.

I was conceived through an accident myself, and if I then had the knowledge of what I would be put through, what I would be made to endure and what life I would have at least up untill now, and had at the same time the choice to abort, I think i would.
I think I would prefer nonexistance, to this.


and saying a life is a life and should be preserved, I think that's just trying to find a reason. like Dw said, taking the moral high ground.

The elderly people of most of the world will start to outnumber the young.

When this happens, the labor force will go down and the economies will do a backwards flip.

Even China, with it's one child law, will start to lose some of it's work force.

Other countries, such as India on the other hand, will have a younger more durable work force than us.

We need more youngsters, and abortion helps do the opposite.

LOL gamer,

I hardly doubt there will be a population decline any time in the near future. The worlds TFR (Total Fertility rate) is currently above 2.1, meaning that the world's population will continue to grow and that the number of elderly will not overcome the number infants born in a year. Abortion does not affect the population of the world that much.

Also funny that you should bring in the elderly. since they are consiered to be part of the dependency ratio. this means they do not contribute to the workforce and instead put a burden on the labor force.

So i highly doubt we will be seeing inversed population pyramids due to abortion.

wow who would have known that AP human geography would come in handy.

This post has been edited by Megil Tel-Zeke: Aug 4 2005, 05:28 PM

Read my posts before making assumptions that I don't care about the children once their born stargazey. I was simply pointing out that by making abortion legal you are adressing the symptoms, that is the miserable lives of the children involved by killing them, without having to deal with the problems, ie poverty, lack of social support, lack of affordable family housing etc. Sweeping problems under the carpet in a highly unethical way simply hides the problem by allieviating the symptoms. How likely are people to allieviate the problems faced by large segmants of society, if the blame is placed on their heads for allowing their own children to live. Banning abortions effectively forces people to either let them suffer or take action, by causing the lives of those who the pro-abortion crowd basicly say should be killed by their parents to avoid them having to face the 'horrid miserable world''. It encourages them to help these people rather than kill them (in an ideal world that is).

On the 'they will not be loved and hence their lives will be misrable argument' whose to say that there parents won't love them when they finally are born anyway. Emotions are fickle afterall and should neither be trusted or endowed with legal power. Many go through periods of uncertainty and end up loving their "unwanted" children even though they could easily have decided to abort them. But the very existance of abortion encourages people to think in terms of "wanted" and "unwanted" babies rather than treating all as equal. People should be encouraged to raise all children they concieve to the best of their ability and society at large should help them, not encouraged to decide whether or not they want them, as though this is somehow relevent.

Whether they initially wanted the child is utterly and completely irrelevant and it is obviously not fair or moral to discriminate between two groups of humans selected on the basis of arbiterily decided criteria, to which anyone could be assigned to on the whim of their mother and then murder one camp, while letting the other group live.

Remember noone is seriously going to try and improve the lives of those who are so devalued that it's societally expected for their parents to have them executed, only by facing the problem face on and actively putting efforts into making the lives of these children better can we get anywhere. You cannot help the dead, only the living. Those who attempt to shy away from the problem by advocating abortion are not only un-ethical but also frankly cowardly aswell. Only the symptoms can motivate people to face up to the disease.
This is the harsh and somewhat unpallatable truth.

This post has been edited by Slayer of Cliffracers: Aug 4 2005, 08:50 PM