New Restrictions on Abortion Have Real World Consequences

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That might be true in general, but I think the rules around the killing of fellow humans is one area where moral absolutes are needed as in no other.



Poetic. Perhaps I am just one herald of another change in season.



To be more precise, we are valuing the temporary physical inconvenience and emotional turmoil of a breathing life over the entirety of a life that is not currently breathing, but will do so.



Though I've been libelled here otherwise, my argument does come from compassion for the unborn, not power and control over women.



Indeed.



Well, who knows what the future holds. You do have about 30 years on me.



We agree there. Truly civilised and moral behaviour demands you go much further than the Golden Rule.



Ohh, how I dislike this phrase. Don't want to commit murder? Don't commit murder!



That "mistake" is a human life. It's not that I lack compassion for the mother, my compassion just does not extend to ending that human "mistake". I do not demand she be a mother in the lifelong sense, but she should carry the pregnancy to term.



I agree.



It is not a parasite, it's a human going through the early stages of human life, as we all did.

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i Suggest A Dance... And

If You Like, Don't Wait 30 Years;

Yes, For It's True, You Might Just

Get 'Eternally Young' Like me Now at 61;

Hehe, It's Real And It Breathes Now.

The Rewards Are In This Life too.

i Value All of Life; Obviously,

Women Most as

The

Empirical
Evidence Shows...

i Surely Allow

Them to Rule Me;

And Only Bring Pleasure to Them...

i Left Humanity to Do 'Bonobo' Instead, Long ago...

As i Knew, i Wouldn't Readily Be Accepted AS Human, Hehe..

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I fail to see how that gives it rights over another person's flesh and you haven't made an argument that actually justifies denying a person their rights.

It's an unfortunate reality that a fetus doesn't own the flesh upon which it depends but it's still the reality.

Even if both entities involved were legally people (and one party is not a person, legally) only one person own's the mother's body, the mother. That means only one person has the right to decide whether or not to continue the pregnancy, the mother.

Whatever nomenclature we use to refer to the ZEF is irrelevant, calling it a parasite or a person doesn't change that it has no rights over the mother's flesh.

How many of you in this thread have actually given birth? Actually carried a child to term and gave birth to a child? Or how many if you have been pregnant and lost that child after the gender was discovered?

Men don't make those decisions for you. In Australia, where MrsPeel lives, women make up half of the electorate, hold a third of the seats in Parliament, 3 of 7 seats on the High Court (including that of Chief Justice), and have also held the office of Prime Minister.

Here in the US, the last time an all-male panel 'made the rules' is when seven men gave women the right to abortion in the first place. At that time less than a quarter of women supported unrestricted access to abortion.


It's more like a single mother and her female doctor deciding whether a boy should be circumcised, which happens all the time. Or a female defense minister deciding which all-male infantry unit to sacrifice.

@aghogday Perhaps I'll start with ballroom dancing.

@funeralxempire

The right to the (temporary) use of her body is simply derived from the idea that the child is a human and has a general right to live.

We touched on autonomy earlier, the apparently absolute right we happily take from women once the baby is a certain age. You never directly stated whether you believe abortion should be legal up to the due date, though you did imply it... is it really an absolute right for you? Do you disagree with the arguments around fetal viability?

Personally I wouldn't make any legal ruling on that matter and leave it to the discretion of those involved.

My comment about men making the rules was not about the gender make-up of government so much as a reaction to the number of men on this thread who see themselves as qualified to have an opinion on something with which they could not possibly have any direct experience, that is, pregnancy and abortion.

And I have questions for Mikah, to get better understanding of his position:
How are you defining human life? What is the start point of a human life? Why have you adopted that start point?

It's right to live can't come at that cost, it can't have a right to live if it requires another person's flesh to do so. That's the crux of what I've been saying, it literally cannot have a right to live if that right to live is entirely dependent on something it has no entitlement to.

I don't believe the state should interfere. I'm fine with doctors refusing to perform them past a certain point and I wouldn't strongly care where any individual draws that line. Overall the goal should still be to reduce the demand for that service but my concerns lay with the person getting the procedure. Any conflict between that person and the ZEF I'm always going to put the person's interests first.

I'm not entirely certain what the ideal solution for how to deal with these situations after viability when there isn't significant health risks for the mother, but how many of those cases actually occur? Canada has no legal restrictions and those cases are basically unheard of so I see no need to make things stricter.

There are professional protocols that make those cases unheard of, that's what I'd prefer.

A human life is you or I, we are human today, we were human yesterday, we were human when children, when toddlers, when babies and well before that. The starting point is conception.



By analysing then eliminating all the other suggested start points. The point where the genetic blueprint is set is the only sensible starting point in my eyes. Before that point, all possibilities are still open. After that point, if you don't interfere, medical issues and failed pregnancies aside, a human like you or me is the end result.

To further reinforce that starting point - biologists, those who study life, do not apply abortion theory to other species. They don't say things like "a baby kangaroo is not really a kangaroo until it can leave its mother's pouch". Life starts right at the beginning, except for humans. It's only for inconvenient, unwanted humans that we start fidgeting, inventing warped philosophies, and saying, "well that's not really a life, that's not really a human being, it's ok to kill them". If you know your history, that should be setting off alarm bells.



Why not? We're back to this magical, sometimes applicable half-Right of bodily autonomy, it's almost lolbertarian libertarian, and coming from someone very left leaning. Run a hypothetical with me. Being somewhat of a socialist, are you morally entitled to access food, water & oxygen, the chemical necessities of life? I know that's a little different from a human body but just for the sake of argument, if you are morally entitled to those things, why? From what does that right derive?



I had a quick look at this, while I can't find any legal restrictions on term limits, according to one site there are no abortion clinics in Canada that offer elective abortions past a 24 week limit. Unheard of because it just isn't available at all.

If one has rights derived from personhood one would need to already be a person to be entitled to those rights, no? If access to those things are viewed as rights those rights would rights that are based on personhood.

Even if one has a right to be provided with a bare minimum of food, no one is going to be forced to put their needs and interests on hold while providing forced labour to contribute towards that goal. That's why that set of rights isn't in conflict with another set of rights.



Like I said in the last post, doctors have imposed restrictions upon themselves but there's no legal limitations. The state has left that decision to the woman and medical professionals involved.

At least we are approaching the core of the argument again. So how is personhood achieved?

Crowning seems like a fair milestone.
Upon taking one's first breath would also seem reasonable.

I'm not sure why so many traditionalists have chosen to abandon that traditional understanding unless it's that tradition itself isn't actually what matters to them.

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It Took ALonG 'Time' For Folks To Achieve

Full Personhood In the United States; Such

As Women's Reproductive Rights And The Right to

Vote; Such As Minority Rights to Vote; Such As Reproductive

Freedom For All In Adult Consensual Relationships too Core to

The Rights to Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Freedoms that Generate

Full Happiness In Lives of Self-Authentic Personhood too; Those Rights

To Personhood are Currently Under Attack By Religious/Political/Philosophies

That Seek to Subjugate And Control The Freedoms of Personhood that Come

With Breathing Sanctity of Human Life; A Last Grasp Indeed to Subjugate and

Control the Freedoms of Others As the Information Highway Provides all

The Information

At Ease

For Most

Folks in the World

Today to Enlighten them

On More Variables of the

Relative Moral Arguments at Hand;

Those Who Seek to Subjugate and Control

Are Currently More on the Losing End of 'The Coin';

And Now, Hell Yes, 'They' are Getting Desperate and their

Selfish Needs for Power And Status in Dominate Control

Are Wide Open More than Ever Before For the World to Clearly See;

'Herstory', Will Not Treat them Well In Terms of How the Future Will

See All of What

'Trump Life'

Brings...

It's True

Personhood

Is Core to the Issue

Here And Everywhere; And Relatively

SPeaKinG; Nature Yes, it is A Moral CuLTuRaL

And All Natural Issue Of Freedom Indeed...

Humans And Their CuLTuRES Make Life

Way, Ways, God Dam More Complicated Than It Needs to Breathe...

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Your starting point for a human life - at conception - makes sense to me.

But termination soon after conception, when the potential person is a tiny bundle of undifferentiated cells, does not seem to me the same as termination of an adult person. In terms of what it is you are actually killing, it is little more than the combination of a sperm and an ovum whose DNA has combined.

What I mean to say is, just because it has the potential to become a self-aware person, doesn't mean it currently is a person, nor should it be necessarily accorded all the rights of a person, where that would cause suffering to other people.

Don't get me wrong, I'm not saying the zygote/fetus has no value and we should not be doing or best for it. But to me a black-and-white argument over the sanctity of life is missing part of the picture - that human rights are not only about the right to life under any circumstances. They are also about a right to live without an excessive level of pain and fear and suffering.

So I think there are certain situations where a girl being forced to bring the baby to term might be judged the more harmful to a human life overall, if one is to consider the amount of suffering to existing humans in addition to the rights of the potential human.

If your argument is that we should be treating the potential person as an actual person because it would become a self-aware human if left alone, how is that different to saying we should not allow the death of sperm, since any one sperm has an individual genetic makeup and the potential to combine with an ovum to produce a specific human, who with the death of that sperm loses any possibility of existence? Just because the sperm is not a person yet, doesn't mean it won't become a person in the future.

I guess what I'm saying is that my instinct is to agree with taking conception as the starting point of a person's life, but I disagree with valuing the early life of that bundle of cells in exactly the same way as the person it may become, or that it's life should automatically take precedence, regardless of the amount of human suffering necessary to maintain it.

Frankly, I don't give a damn whether a ZEF is a "person" or not.

Under no circumstances is one person legally entitled to use the body of another person to survive.