Opinions on abortion?

Post Reply New Topic

Fruit analogies, wonderful. I'm saying my statement applies because both are fruit. You are saying no, it doesn't apply because one is an apple and another is an orange. You're deviating and overcomplicating, I suspect because you know I am right.

Edit: actually it's even dumber than that. You are saying they are not both fruit, because one is an apple and one is an orange.

I'm prepared to discuss the comparison with marital rape. You are correct, it was legal in the 60s, and those who thought it should remain legal could certainly have used that slogan. I believe as a society we've matured since then - not far enough, plainly, given our current atmosphere of bigotry and xenophobia, but at least we've moved far enough from the bloodthirsty idiocy of Biblical law that we can recognize those earlier laws as unethical.

Abortion is currently legal, so the slogan is still effective in my opinion. Those who disagree must seek to get the laws changed, just as those who thought marital rape should be criminalized had to do over the course of a few decades in our not-too-distant past.

Giving a man the absolute right to use his wife's body for sex regardless of her opinion on the matter smacked of slavery - another thing the Christian Bible mystically fails to condemn. We've reached a point where we (mostly) recognize the rights of individuals to bodily integrity. For example, you have the right to refuse medical treatment even if the result is your own death. Further, and this is important, suppose you and I are walking along the sidewalk together. A car veers off the roadway and hits me, and my brachial artery is nicked. I'm lying on the path, spurting blood. Conveniently, a medic truck happens to be right behind the car that hit me, and they leap out. "Oh no!," they cry, "we can stop the bleeding but without an immediate transfusion she won't live to reach the hospital!" You're standing right there. Even if you're a universal donor, you cannot be compelled to open a vein to save my life - because you have the right of bodily integrity. I like to think you would anyway, because you seem a decent sort, but if you refuse you're not liable under the law.

Women fear, and rightly so, that setting aside this right in the case of pregnancy will lead to the loss of other rights. Having, as you point out, only fairly recently escaped from being treated as chattel to our husbands and fathers...we're going to be wary. The very thought that my right to control my own life could be torn away, because the "right" of a man's sperm to use my uterus as an incubator for forty weeks is more important to a bunch of moldy old a**holes who don't have a uterus? Obscene. Simply obscene. I'm not property, not a broodmare, not a slave, and not a life-support system for a fetus I don't choose to carry.

Some (backward, asinine, horrible) legislators have already suggested, and tried to make laws mandating, that women who miscarry should be charged with manslaughter and jailed. The Mayo Clinic reports that 10 to 20 percent of known pregnancies end in miscarriage, and further states the actual number is likely higher because many miscarriages occur so early in pregnancy that a woman doesn't realize she's pregnant. Can you see why women react with outright hostility when men propose the legal right to terminate a pregnancy be removed?

We die in childbirth. In the U.S., maternal mortality rates are higher than any other developed nation, and they're still rising. You can't be required to give a pint of blood to save the life of an adult human, but a woman should be required to risk her own life to support a fetus that may kill her. This idea is troubling to women.

Yeah, I get it. It's better to bring an unwanted, unloved child into a living situation where they will likely be abused, neglected, or just have a plain miserable life than it is for them to never be born at all. Or the mother may be a drug addict or an alcoholic and pass it on to their newborn.

And that's all I have to say about that.

So basically, I should just accept that you're going to oversimplify the issue, because how dare we discuss relevant specifics? I guess by discussing the issue with an adequate degree of depth you'd have to concede you have no argument, and we couldn't have that.

Both my positions boil down to a simple premise, one owns their own flesh and has absolute say over access to it and the right to terminate permission for access at their discretion. Still too complicated for you?

Effective maybe, but not right, or very clever. I don't wish to start a debate on marital rape, I actually broadly agree with the law. I simply wish it acknowledged that abortion shouldn't be dismissed with such a stupid slogan just as marital rape shouldn't be. Funeralxempire can't accept this, misses the forest for the trees and is content to keep digging himself in deeper.

The rest of it all came up in the other threads, including the parallels with organ donations or blood transfusions. Feel free to peruse my opinions if you care.

It's almost comical how you miss the point. There you go again comparing two different fruits and loudly proclaiming they are not both fruit because they are different.

I saw that short-lived post funeralxempire. That is as close to concession as you get in most internet debates.

I did skim through, and I would agree the discussion with carturo was interesting.

I'm just as pleased not to dash off on the marital rape tangent, and yes, abortion is a complex topic to anyone who's given it serious thought - the fact is that for women, that serious thought is often brutally inescapable, while for men, if it is undertaken at all, it's generally malicious. I'm confident you're aware that many of our reactions ("our" in this case meaning women) are intensely emotional because we have had to deal with the topic in terms of brutal, often bloody reality rather than as a more abstract intellectual concept. I'm a rationalist, to the greatest extent that it's possible for me, but this difference in experience inevitably leads to more visceral reactions. (Hah. Visceral. Because uterus.)

I do not accuse you of malice. You don't seem to get angry about it, so far as I can tell, though plainly identifying someone else's emotional state isn't a particular skill of mine, so you could be mad as hell and simply expressing it in ways that don't involve vulgar frothing and lashing about. On the other hand, while sometimes your discussion style seems to verge on the dispassion of a true thought experiment, at other times it seems likely that you do feel quite strongly about it and simply choose a less immediately counterproductive approach.

There were several occasions, scattered throughout, where you were/seemed to be looking for others to clarify a position regarding the beginning of life and/or "personhood"...I'll have to work on that term, as it just seems a bit woo-woo to me, but I don't have a better one at the tip of my tongue. Sentience? Consciousness?

I'll dive into the personal. Feel free to let me know it's not up for discussion if needed. Beyond the moral or ethical judgement involved, your commitment to the sanctity and preservation of human life (if that phrasing is accurate), do you have some skin in this game? Mind you, if not it doesn't mean I dismiss your ideas. I tend to think human life and the human experience are a right and proper topic of discussion for any human being with an interest.

Stamping your feet and insisting you've won isn't the same as winning, but whatever you need to keep telling yourself son.

I think this is unfair, that suspicion of maliciousness when men enter the debate. I do understand where it comes from. I know exactly how and from which position pro-abortion women enter this debate, the incorrect assumption is that men like me enter it from the same place, on the opposite ("anti-woman"/"anti-autonomy") side. I do have socially conservative views on marriage and sex, but this is NOT why I pick the side I do in this debate. If you suspect men are taking the anti-abortion side because of secret desires to control a woman's sexuality, then ask their position on contraception. Contraception prevents far more pregnancy than abortions terminate and gives women far more sexual freedom than abortion ever did, to the point where the abortion debate becomes almost pointless if controlling a woman's sexuality is your goal. I have no moral qualms about contraception.

The problem is further confused when I say I would approve of a change in the abortion laws, the response is always "so you want to control women". Well yes, I want the killing to stop, but it's not the same kind of control, it doesn't originate from that damp dark cave of assumed misogyny.

As for a woman's unique perspective... this too was argued in the other threads. I am suspicious of the call. To attempt to be dispassionate is often more useful for moral and legal judgments. It's the reason we ask judges unknown to both parties to decide the fate of convicted criminals, rather than letting the victims and the personally involved to "sort that s**t out" with a hammer and an electric drill.



Yes, quite aware, I accept them all as real problems worthy of consideration. I argue though, that these problems could not be put forward as reason to kill slightly older humans.



I'm not a robot. What you don't see in those threads any more is the barrage of personal attacks that were later removed. I do have a boyish tendency to weaponise my arguments into provoking maximal emotional responses, but it is rarely unprovoked.



I ask because I know they don't have one, if there was coherent position, it would be shouted from the rooftops, a mandatory part of the curriculum, taught in school from the age of five.

The terms life, personhood, sentience, consciousness, viability are not brought into the argument by people like me. They come from problems with the pro-abortion argument. They know, at least dimly, that if what they are doing is killing another human being, almost all instances of abortion are morally wrong. So, for them not to be monsters, what is removed must not be a human being, it must be something else. This is where the argument veers into idiocy and quite disturbing dehumanisation of the unborn. They take three options at this point. 1) deny its humanness (e.g. viability), 2) accept its humanness and redefine it as something else that does not deserve any protection (this is where personhood etc come in) or 3) accept its humanness and argue killing is ok anyway due to the usual arguments (this usually doesn't last long when you ask them to apply their scenarios to slightly older humans).




Not directly, besides being in a state that allows this to happen on an industrial scale. Even though I argue against it, there is that nagging feeling of partial responsibility, of a share in a collective guilt.

Necessary evil.

That would be taking position 3 above. How far do we take this? What about children already born to unfit, unable or unwilling mothers? Sorry kiddo, time to exercise some necessary evil?

In the context of the world most of WP's users inhabit, "faith" = "Christianity", which I'm going to presume is what you're taking issue with. The specific Christian morality against abortion is based on the Golden Rule, which predates Christianity and is found in myriad ancient cultures, philosophies and rule sets. I therefore reject any complaint regarding pro-life as being a "faith thing" or "a religious thing" or even a "right wing thing" as ad hominem - and my views on religion are widely documented on this board.

Nobody seems to be speaking in terms of principles, rather I'm seeing emotional arguments, fallacies and even outright sexist views - 'no uterus? - STFU' is right up there with 'no penis? - get in the kitchen and make me a sandwich'.

To the best of my understanding, life begins at conception. The distinctions we make between increasingly complex "bundles of cells" are largely arbitrary, the 'rights' based arguments are based on ever-evolving legal definitions and standards (as Mikah alluded to and which several people completely missed the point of), and personal accountability for the overwhelming majority of pregnancies is brushed aside with the application of the tangential "rape baby gambit" which renders the right of an unborn human to live to be considered of lower value than the supposed "right" of an adult human to have sexual intercourse without consequence.

The discussion we should be having is what rights an unborn human should be entitled to, at which stage of development and why. Sadly, as with all 'hot button' topics, the abortion debate is one which is doomed to be dominated by partisans who prefer the security of the established axioms over the trauma of making a genuine effort to examine the rationale behind the beliefs which they cleave to.

As for myself. I prefer to err on the side of caution and side with the individual rights of the unborn child to "life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness".

Those kids usually wind up as wards of the state.

I'm 100% pro choice.

I don't think your arguement is very good, you're saying the consequences should fall on the parents? It doesn't tho, it falls on the child. The child will without a doubt go through alot less suffering, being killed before it's able to feel anything, rather than go through a whole life of suffering being born and raised by incapable and/or uninvolved parents.
The child might even grow up to become violent, or anti social in other ways, which will only expand the suffering to others.

We're also running into a problem of our planet getting overcrowded, and the earths natural resources having a hard time keeping up. From a birds eye view, there's exactly 0 benefit to being against abortion.

It honestly makes zero sense to me.

You've just made an argument for involuntary euthanasia, as well as for executing humans for the actions of others.



You might have an episode, grab a gun and mow down innocents tomorrow. Should you be killed too?

You're not making anything resembling a sensible or principled argument for or against abortion.



What is the hard cap on the number of people we can support? I keep hearing about overcrowding, but then Western nations go ahead and swell their ranks with immigrants from nations whose birth rates vastly exceed their own, and hearing about the "crisis" of plummeting birth rates in some nations (most notably Japan).

If you're worried about there being too many people, you have a simple choice you can make that only affects you:

Don't have sex.

Simple enough, isn't it?



Two wrongs don't make a right.