What someone has said about abortion on another forum.

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People that think they ought to decide for you out of their morale and/or religious standpoint. Some claim that all precautions gains producing offspring is sin, and its a sin not to marry.
What I want to understand is why people listen to this and act seemingly without thinking and deciding for themselves. Your place and standing in society? Some sort of power-hustling within groups?
Anyone got any good ideas explaining this self-inflicted slavery and servitude?

Google the phrase "I was only following orders" (or "Ich folgte nur ordnungen" in German).

Google 'use my backdoor cause I love Jesus'

(fallinofmychairrollingontheflooroohmybellyhurt)

Skip to 4:05

Heck no, enjoying every bit of it, its priceless.

I'm amazed, I just love that people can do stuff like this. I just blab blab bla. This is so much better

Edit: removed link

It’s a simple fact. Zefs are not people and should not be granted the rights and protections we offer to people.

That does not mean that people are not entitled to grieve for miscarried zefs. People are entitled to grieve for all sorts of things that don’t come to pass, or that aren’t people. You are allowed to grieve when your house burns down with nobody inside and comprehensive insurance. That doesn’t make your house a person. You are allowed to grieve when a pet dies. That doesn’t make your pet a person (although in most cases it has a stronger claim to personhood than a zef). You are allowed to grieve when an opportunity collapses, but that doesn’t make the opportunity a person.

What differentiates a person from a non-person isn’t whether we grieve for it, but whether it has a sense of its ongoing existence. Persons have natural rights, and should have legal rights. Non-persons do not have natural rights, and should not have legal rights.

That's still seriously insensitive.

Besides that, there's a long-standing pattern of people and societies attempting to define humanity in terms of including some or excluding those who inconvenienced them along with all sorts of rationalizations for destroying individuals and entire groups. You might as well have said: It’s a simple fact. Jews are not people and should not be granted the rights and protections we offer to people. You can qualify the rest of your context any way you like, but it's not going to change the fact that you are choosing to strip a human organism of its humanity.

The term "zef" as used amounts to about the same thing as a racial slur. Why not just say:



I'm well aware of where the term comes from and what it means, but the depersonalizing effect and even the intent is no different than someone else's use of the n-word (blacks), the k-word (Jews), the c-word (women), the f-word (homosexuals), and others. Moreover, the "f" in that word more likely DOES have a sense of its ongoing existence, or if you define it slightly differently you could rationalize killing living babies already outside the womb. I would go so far as to say a "sense of...ongoing existence" is even irrelevant, AND that the "z" at least knows enough to sustain itself by attaching to the womb in the first place.

To be perfectly clear: I do NOT oppose ALL abortion. I think abortion can certainly be a medically necessary, emergency procedure. But I cannot deny that it is a human individual who is destroyed in the process. I don't have to lie to myself and rationalize a home invader as subhuman before I take whatever necessary measures I have to in protecting myself and my family. I don't have to make up offensive names for foreigners to kill them if I ever had to fight them in a war. I can support the death penalty and not lose any sleep over it without the need to recognize the condemned as anything else besides a human individual. I can discuss why I disagree with someone's lifestyle choices or sexual orientation without using offensive or hateful words or imposing my own ideas about that on someone different from me. I recognize that the destruction of individuals or groups is occasionally necessary (but not preferred) and that I'm NOT obligated to just blindly go along with what everyone says I'm supposed to believe or how I'm supposed to behave, and doing so does not require me to strip others of their humanity. Using the z-word is just another offensive way of doing essentially the same thing as a means of compensating for something else. Guilt, perhaps? In other words, people who support abortion may OTHERWISE oppose things like guns and the death penalty. They find those kinds of things, the destruction of human life, to be horribly offensive, yet rationalize that a woman's right to her own body means abortion is ALWAYS necessary. There's no guilt in killing a z-word because, duh, it's a z-word and not a person. Therefore, that kind of person doesn't have to face guilt or inconsistency. You have no problem killing another human being. Why not just say what you're really thinking?

Even if you still cling to that idea, insisting that z-words aren't actually human or whatever, all you have to do is just refer to them as "unborn." That term is much more neutral without overtly assigning or denying humanity, as opposed to the z-word which isn't really neutral at all. It's certainly not offensive in the way that the z-word is.

I think of a baby growing inside a woman as being an "emergent person."

Why shouldn't a person grieve for someone who was an "emergent person"?

Hi Angelrho

If you prefer to use the term unborn, then that's 9 months. It do not describe anything. But to your terms of thinking this is best?, the easiest to defend. People even call fertilized eggs as babies. Sorry, no, wrong use of words.

How about gametes? God say dont spill the seed on the soil, right?
If you want to save any stem cell mass, protect the gametes too.

Well, whatever we think about this, its a slippery slope. The best qualified to decide is ovary carrying females.
Only ovary carrying females.

Why do you think you have a right to control someone else?

Yep, personally I think of an 'emergent complex cell-structure with potential to become a person'
My x-wife always pated her big belly and said to the effect, this will be born and become a baby. I follow here advice.

You do realize your definition of "personhood" doesn't really include people with various, profound disabilities. By your own logic, people who have severe brain damage or mental disabilities and are assumed to not be properly aware of what's going on around them, so thus have "no sense of their ongoing existence", are not people and should have no rights.

I hope there is more to your logic and that isn't just it, because your definition of "personhood" has a huge, unmissable slippery slope involved in it that is already often used to dehumanize a group of people.

In my mind, the fetus is a full person when he/she starts looking like a person, and responds (in basic term) like a person would. Sometime between 2-3 months gestation.

I don't feel there's any dispute that the fetus, at approximately 6-7 months gestation, is a fully-realized infant person.

I'm pro-choice---but I do believe a laudable objective is to seek to avoid having to get an abortion. For both men and women.

I honestly don't care if someone wants to say that a fetus isn't a person, as long as they're not forcing that view onto other people, but the "logic" people give during these conversations shouldn't dehumanize a group that is inarguably human. If your "logic" does that it needs to be thought through and defined a little more.

Where in the Bible is it written that God says not to spill the seed on the soil? Go find it, I'll wait.

Don't confuse "living thing" or "life" with "human being." Gametes are living cells, they are human, but they by themselves are not individual humans. There's no debate about when life begins, because gametes are living. The debate is about which point these things can be considered individuals that must be protected.

Who says I think I have a right to control someone else? That's a bit of a red herring, and whether I want to control someone or not is irrelevant.

However...if it's about control, then we should abolish all government. If it's about control, then our will must, by necessity, be subject to the whims and desires of others. If the value is that we must never control another person's body, then women cannot be allowed to fight or restrain men from satisfying their own physical urges. If it's about control, then women cannot be allowed to control the growth of a new human individual growing inside them. At what point does it become morally acceptable to kill someone else for the sake of control if everyone is compelled to allow others to control themselves or not? The control argument is entirely too inconsistent. Someone is going to live, and someone is going to die. In the case of abortion, it's open season on babies who pose no real, reasonable, unusual threat to the life and health of the mother. Killing another person in any other circumstance would be considered murder. However, it is NOT considered unusual or unreasonable to kill someone either for the sake of justice or for one's own protection. Can an abortion be described as reasonable and just? I can accept abortion if it is. I cannot accept abortion otherwise.

But guaranteeing women control over their own bodies without guaranteeing the same control for everyone else is not just at all. It's not compassionate, nor is it fair. Nor is the existence of any government which does exercise the power to control the society it governs fair or compassionate if we are to apply the same standard.

However, a better, more objective standard is that government DOES exercise a limited amount of control to ensure the safety of its citizens and to establish reasonable law and order. And that does mean exercising control over the bodies of certain others--we can do as we wish as long as we do not cause harm to others, and the boundaries of our freedom and individual rights extend only to the limits of the freedom and individual rights of others. We cannot be allowed to threaten the life and property of other individuals. Abortion does threaten the life of the unborn. It is not the desire to control women that is in view here, but rather the desire to protect those who cannot protect themselves. Why? Because ALL of us are vulnerable in the womb. ALL OF US. To say that it's acceptable for a woman to kill an individual within the womb is to also say that individual rights and freedoms do not exist OUTSIDE the womb, either, and that women are the sole judges, juries, and executioners of all people now living. I'm not aware of any western, free society that gives anyone of any gender that level of power. The choice to continue living in such a society rests in the individual himself or herself. One may choose to commit suicide, one may choose to commit a crime, or one may freely LIVE within the bounds of law and order. If such law and order allows limited control over others, and if carrying a baby to term is ordinary, natural, and reasonable, then there is no logical reason to abort the baby.

Children are extensions of their parents, too, and it is unreasonable to harm your own body, your own flesh and blood. It doesn't make sense to have abortions UNLESS that child, as part of your own body, poses a threat to the life of the rest of it. Comparatively speaking, this is unusual and increasingly rare. If society is already accepting of limited control over itself through the ordinary, natural function of reasonable government, it's only reasonable that such control extend to protecting the lives of the unborn as well. The argument that we're saying women are not allowed to control their own bodies fails on the grounds that it's already acceptable to exercise control over the bodies of others INCLUDING women. That control already exists. And I can't imagine a greater purpose for such control within reasonable limits than to ensure the life and freedom of all individuals.

***The proper role of government is not total control over a population, but rather to ensure that the society it's responsible for has the ability to act freely without causing harm to individuals. Freedom is always limited, and nobody is allowed complete, total, unfettered control over himself. I'm not legally allowed to indiscriminately kill anyone I feel like killing. I can only act to protect myself in the event I have no other options available. Life and freedom are always preferred, and limited control is always necessary to allow that. Women cannot be guaranteed any more unfettered freedom than anyone else can be. Beyond preserving a maximal amount of freedom, government action becomes unreasonable. But because we can be controlled within reason, the same could be said of women's rights as with anyone's rights. An ideal free society cannot exist by granting any gender special privileges based on gender, nor can it coexist with the creation of special victim classes that do the same. Women are not victims. They are people. The true victims in this case are those PEOPLE who are denied the right to exist who never threatened the same rights of others.

I think Gaffer is referring to the story of Onan.