Abortion, Legal or Illiegal, poll and debate? Options

[Slayer of Cliffracers]

This is my position........

Abortion, unless done purely for the purposes of offsetting an imediate threat to the mother's life (choice 2) is murder by definition. Murder is the deliberate and pre-meditated killing of another human that is not done in self-defense. Upon what definition does a human fetus not constitute a human. It is the form taken by a human life at a certain stage of it's growth and development, it is not any other species therefore it is a human life. To draw an arbitery line in the sand at a certain point of the growth and development of a human life is ridiculous.

Sure the embryo at very early stages of it's development isn't conscious, but so what? Are we to excuse everyone who kills his victims say when in deep sleep, or while knocked out, on the basic that since they aren't presently conscious, they aren't officially human. The position of the embryo is exactly the same as the sleeping person, though they aren't conscious at present they will become so at a later point as their development reaches whatever mysterious point that they need to get too to become conscious. The fetus is thus 100% alive and 100% human and the process of abortion makes it 100% dead and 100% human, hence abortion is murder.

What about the other pro-abortion argument that the embryo/fetus constitutes a part of the woman's body. This doesn't make sense either. The embryo/fetus has a seperate genetic code (unless it's a clone) from it's mother and though it is totally dependant on it's mother for everything still constitutes a seperate entity inside the mothers body. If the fetus is considered part of the mother, that would mean that she can logically claim to be a bacterium, a virus, an intestinal worm or an ameoba, as all of these could also be inside her, along with millions of other parisites.

So abortion is murder.

[Alexander]

Abortion is a woman's choice. Who are you and I to tell a woman what she can do in her body? Condoms are not foolproof, nor are birth control pills.

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.

Germany was Hitler's nation, was he right to do what he did?

Why carry out the act if you're not willing to bear the responsibility of what normally occurs without an unnatural prevention method?

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

A little off-topic...

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

:nono:

no going off topic star

[Dantrag]

it's not fair to force someone to ruin their life for a mistake.

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.

[Alexander]

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.

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.

[Slayer of Cliffracers]

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.

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

[Slayer of Cliffracers]

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.