What do you think about abortion

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(I forgot to mention my thoughts on abortion. I mentioned one in an earlier thread. Here's another.)

Anti-abortionists assert that a fetus is a person any time after fertilization of the egg, with all the corresponding rights. Let's assume just for a moment that is true.

Let's say someone contracted leukemia and needed a bone marrow transplant.

Would it be ethical for the State to legally force you to undergo the pain and risk of providing it to them because you were a good match -or even a perfect one- or should it be your choice?

Let's take it a step further.

Let's say someone had multiple organ failure and until new organs could be found, a doctor developed a technique whereby their blood system could be connected to that of a healthy person who was a match. The donor's body would then oxygenate, de-carbonate, feed and filter out toxins for the body with the non-functioning organs. Lets say it was determined that this could be done safely for, oh...nine months. And the technique had a 65%-83% success rate for saving the life of the recipient. Of course, the donor's body will be stressed heavily for that time. There's a fair chance of permanent, negative side effects, and a chance they could die.

Now let's say you were found to be a close enough donor. Would it be ethical for the State to force you to be physically attached to that person, providing for their body, with all the inconveniences and risks that go along with it, or should you get to make that choice for your own body?

Then I shall rebut.

It's not a great analogy and I think it has wandered into a separate argument Edenthiel, dealing with the morality of action vs inaction, the question of becoming pregnant vs remaining pregnant. The analogy doesn't quite work because if abortion is an option then bodily dependence has already occurred, the choice to donate your body has already been made in a way. To make your scenario fit with pregnancy, bizarre circumstances would have to have tied you to this unfortunate diseased person and you are deciding whether to cut off their life support because it is temporarily inconvenient to you.

A better analogy along those lines would be conjoined twins (hypothetically with full personhood if you like), if you separate them now, one will live and one will die, if you wait 9 months, inconveniencing one of them, then both can live.

But for some fun we can analyse your scenario with current abortion laws. The state says once you are connected to this person, for whatever reason, you can voluntarily end this procedure up to about half way through. It's true your patient might survive on his or her own after that point without the treatment but we have decided its immoral to do so. Cutting them off before that when he or she will definitely die is absolutely fine. Sounds ridiculous doesn't it.

This thread is going to go exactly the same way as the other one. As I said in the other thread, bodily autonomy is only raised when it suits people's desires. We legally deny it to drug takers, prostitutes, nudists and most relevantly pregnant women who are over the 24 week mark. If bodily autonomy is sacred, abortion is moral and should be legal at any point during pregnancy. But, aghast at the notion of an abortion at 8 months people meander, they say autonomy is only sacred sometimes, for some humans, in certain circumstances and certainly not for the baby, except when its over 24 weeks old, then they say actually lets redefine humanness in terms of bodily independence to ease our guilt because who knows. This is called inconsistency. More often than not that means they are wrong and need to go back to the drawing board.

Bodily autonomy *is* indeed sacred, to women. Thank you for seeing that point, and the inconsistency. Our laws are such because lawmaking is a messy attempt to balance appealing to constituencies.

I think you missed my point, it's only sacred when women want to justify abortion, and never applies to the baby inside her. Autonomy for me but not for thee. Once people accept they are being hypocritical, then they return to the root of the argument, the nature of the being inside her, is it human or not. Because they wish to avoid inconvenience and assuage guilt they will claim it is not human.

This is the kind of thinking you are engaged in:

-"All men are created equal" in America when the declaration of independence was created, unless of course you were a slave imported from Africa. They weren't really humans duh they were slaves.

-You don't need to feel bad about concentration camps, they may look like humans, but they aren't. They are Jews duh.

-Bodily autonomy is a human right, but unborn children are not human duh so we can rip them apart in the womb.

Welcome to the human race, we always find ways to justify heinous wrongs when it suits us.

Comparing women who get abortions to Nazis who ran concentration camps.

Except that once again you appear to be making the assumption that all life inside a uterus is a person, a full human being (like a black slave or german jew). It's a false equivalence; biologically up until some given point it is quite clear they are not (and yes, I'm well aware of how that argument has been used in the examples given). The difference really is one of degree, and I think you might be aware of that. It's the same argument that is used to argue animals rights. In both cases (fetuses and animals), there is an end of the spectrum where something is clearly not human, and one where it clearly is human. To claim that something on the "not" end is still human person, and deserves all the same rights is an error.

You've done exactly what I said you would, reclassified humanness and personhood to suit your desires and we're back to the root of the problem, the nature of the being inhabiting a womb.

Good, are you not even slightly disturbed by that?

We touched on personhood in the previous thread, and no one really complained when I dismissed it as a sensible way to define whether someone is worthy of protection. According to US law, humans aren't really persons until they are adults more or less, to try and define it philosophically it's just as sketchy and you almost invariably end up accidentally justifying the murder of any non-adult human if their parents can't be bothered any more.

Again from the previous thread, I put forward an argument that baby/fetus/fertilised egg cannot really be anything else other than a human being right from the beginning. No one tried to rebut it. My position follows from that, I must extend to it the same rights as other human beings, if their life is to be terminated, it should be for an extraordinarily good reason and of all the reasons to abort people give the only one that has so far held water was abnormal danger to the mother's life.

I make the Nazi comparison because it was the one that shook me into thinking about this, before I had accepted the fashionable opinion that abortion was a moral good without really thinking about it. The sentence in question was along the lines(apologies I cannot remember the exact quote or who said it):

"People often like to dream about what they would have done under the Nazi regime, or some other awful state, they fantasise about joining the resistance, assassinating political leaders, being remembered as a hero. But right now they live in a society where 100000+ (uk stats) human beings, children, are massacred on an annual basis and what do they do about it? Nothing."

My first gut instinct was to say "they aren't children" as is yours but it was enough to make me actually think about this issue and I found my original opinion not only to be wrong, but utterly shameful. In fact I no longer trust fashionable opinion on anything.

You mean, for example, something that a fetus is not a human, like a chrysalis is not a real butterfly, or as Pluto is not a true planet full sense of the word

if so do you think you are wrong, the fetus is a human being has a human soul, given by God, both in the Bible and the Torah is given that man is from the moment of conception, irrespective of the degree of biological development until natural death. According to the Koran the book of religious Muslims, the human being is a fetus until the 4th month of pregnancy, since then Allah gives people the soul, and so abortion can be carried out only to the 4th month of pregnancy, since then it is Haram, which is a sin according to the interpretation of Islam, but we all know that at this point the Quran is wrong, only the Bible and the Torah are true

I don't think the fetus has the right to derive its life at the mother's inconvenience. It's debatable whether us guys have any business weighing in on this either because this is a scenario we'll never have to face. I get to make my personal life decisions and I can't tell you how pissed I'd be if anyone tried to step in and make them form me.

And yet, here are a bunch of guys in this very thread who think their opinion on the issue of women's bodies and what women can do with them is important.

To get back to the original blog post, all I see is someone seizing on an extreme example and putting the worst possible spin on it to justify the position that no abortion should ever take place anywhere, any time, for any reason.

The assumption in the blog post that this was a 'eugenic' abortion is just that: an assumption. None of us, including the author of the blog, were there when the doctor gave his or her prognosis. None of us heard the conversations the parents had with each other and the various specialists. We can't know if they terminated because they wanted a perfect baby. They could just as easily have made the decision because they didn't want to bring a child into the world to suffer. According to the newspaper article the child had 'a congenital heart defect that would require years of operations, if he survived at all'. If that's so, we're not talking about getting rid of a child with a harelip or a missing ear.

In reality the parents probably considered a number of factors before making their choice. Again, we don't know what they were, but it's no great leap to say that it must have been a horrible decision. These were clearly much-wanted children, as they were already named and had been carried to 32 weeks. To then lose them both due to a terrible medical mistake - I feel nothing but compassion for their parents. It makes me feel sad and uncomfortable, not to mention angry, that so many people have rushed to judgement.

I just do not like the fact that someone decides to have an abortion only for the fact that potential child may be sick, as if disabled children do not deserve it to be born

If the fetus cannot survive long outside the womb and can only expect to live a very short, unpleasant, and painful life, then who does forcing that child to go through that serve, God, or selfish ignorant men like yourself who think they should be allowed to dictate how a mother makes a very difficult decision with her own body?

It's not our call to make, opening the door to aborting imperfect children will take us down such a dark road, a road we are more or less on already. Kids are already aborted for having Down's syndrome, minor defects, even for the crime of being female. How long before we can detect autism or homosexuality in the womb? If you are betting that children won't be aborted for those reasons, you will be sadly disappointed.

The rest of us are going to have to learn to live with those decisions as we learn to mind our own business.

I still think it's the woman's choice and it's unfortunate the fetuses swapped so it was a tragic thing. This is something to consider when any woman wants to do an abortion when pregnant with twins. This tragedy could possibly happen.