Roe v. Wade is history

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You said they were entitled to a right to life being they were independent agents who have an identity apart from their parents.

That being said, why are humans specifically entitled to a right to life but not, for example, bacteria?

My answer is that humans have a sense of ourselves as beings existing through time and wish for that existence to continue. The unborn do not have that, and so they shouldn't be entitled to the same prediction as thinking beings like pigs and dogs, never mind actual humans. They should be granted protection that is appropriate to their developmental stage. Embryos should be as protected as bacteria, which is to say, not at all. Foetuses should be as protected as comparable animals, like cod for example.

Irrelevant. They are a human being. They are entitled to a right to life.

They are human, but not really human beings I think sentience is required to be a human being.

Also, mothers are more at risk than ever now...plenty of doctors complaining of not being able to perform necessary abortions. Because of unclear regulations on what constitutes life of the mother being in danger. Apparantely in a lot of cases women are being forced to keep a dangerous or unviable pregnancy until they actually start having life threatening symptoms because they can't get an abortion until their life is in immediate danger. It is inevitable women will die because of this according to doctors. Also some may end up unable to attempt further pregnancies due to complications from having to wait to long for treatment when the treatment is abortion.

here:
https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/us/women-face-risks-as-doctors-struggle-with-medical-exceptions-on-abortion/ar-AAZMGiv?ocid=msedgntp&cvid=709e1c1d6db04141902cf9e4947aeb5b

I can't help thinking that is a lot more barbaric than aborting an organism with human dna that is not a sentient person yet. Regardless of what you think about abortion, that is the real world consequences abortion bans are having.

Finally, a respectable question.

I think that's going to be an important debate.

Ok, there's no such thing as an "unfertilized fertilized" egg. Either an egg is fertilized or it is not.

If you meant a fertilized egg that doesn't implant, or frozen embryos or IVF that doesn't take/implant/survive, etc., that's a question of personhood that I don't really think is going to be as simple as saying, ok, personhood begins at fertilization. That's going to make things waaaaaaay complicated and it's going to be disastrous for the courts and the justice system. I think we have to draw a very clear line, and I think we've got plenty of laws that establish principles on how to handle these cases.

Take spontaneous/accidental abortions, as you mentioned. You can't be charged for negligence for things that aren't your fault in the first place, such as if there are issues with the uterus that won't support a pregnancy, environmental/chemical issues that might cause the death of a baby, and so on. You might have the right to sue a polluter if you have a miscarriage. And accidents do happen through no fault of the mother that result in a loss. See, in those kinds of situations, there are already laws that protect people who haven't done anything wrong and punish those who are the root cause of negligent death, miscarriage, and so on. With a new pregnancy, exactly how do you prosecute a miscarriage? First of all, what crime has been committed? Second, how are you going to get evidence? Doctors can't be called upon to testify against their patients, and if OB/GYN's were to start snitching on every single miscarriage they handle, pretty soon women just won't go to any doctor. So if prosecutors aren't allowed to violate a woman's right to privacy and doctor-patient privilege, how are prosecutors even going to have evidence of a crime? If doctors become required by law to report miscarriages, you risk all the OB's quitting and med students being discouraged from specializing in OB.

I mean...it would be pretty easy to ban abortion. When you have legal abortion and abortion clinics, you have to find doctors willing to actually perform the procedure. Doctors don't like performing abortions because it hurts their reputation and raises too many questions of ethics. It's hard enough to find doctors who will do it as it is. So banning abortion outright isn't a tremendous leap.

And so because that's something that could be done, then you really do have to contend with spontaneous abortion. And, tbh, that's not even that difficult to do. That is something that is natural and occurred before men first started drawing hentai on cave walls thousands of years ago. So I think since you can't reasonably fault women for that, you can't expect to get evidence for it, you can't nitpick it anywhere close to what you could with any other crime anyone has ever dreamed up, then you're not going to go after women now. Even the Bible recognizes that accidents happen and that a miscarriage caused by another person is considered an accident and whoever causes the miscarriage should pay restitution according to the usual penalty for accidental death. In the case of the Bible, there are a lot of leniencies that are given in these cases that you wouldn't extend to adults--accidental death would result in the equivalent of incarceration in a prison city (or city of refuge). I'm not meaning to bring religion into it, I just mean you've got millennia of tradition and law that give a pretty good template for how we could handle it in the present day. There is no need to make it more complicated.

You might not like it, but it's certainly relevant.

So, why do you think some things are entitled to a right to life but not others? I don't think "human" is a meaningful distinction - do you?

In other words, there is still a line.
Then where this line is is negotiable.

Incidentally, East Asian countries / regions generally stipulate that babies belong to human beings in the legal sense only after birth.
China's interpretation of "birth" is that "the fetus is outside the mother and can breathe independently according to its own lungs".

Last edited by SkinnedWolf on 20 Jul 2022, 4:08 pm, edited 1 time in total.

Then euthanize all the old people and the mentally ret*d. Easy peasy.


Yeah, but everything you're referring to here is a myth. You can find anyone to say whatever you want to support whatever biases you hold. It's a fact that the state of medicine has improved to the extent that what has conventionally been held to be viable has been blurred. People who are in favor of killing babies and fighting it through the court system have failed to acknowledge the capacity for science and medicine to learn new things about unborn babies at various stages of development, instead falling back on classic argumentation as established by Roe and Casey. The truth is that human knowledge in medicine and science is evolving and the pro-murder crowd chooses to die on the hill that medicine and science have nothing left to offer. This was one of the main weaknesses exposed in Dobbs vs. JWHO and is largely responsible for overturning Roe/Casey.

This idea of pregnancy being a danger to women is exaggerated. It is dangerous to SOME women. SOME pregnancies are complicated. SOME pregnancies threaten the life of the mother. Women often do prefer to risk their bodies for the sake of their baby because they WANT their babies. They aren't going to be forced to have abortions, and already the medical community is concerned with saving the lives of both babies and mothers. So that's never going to change for as long as mothers give birth. And what if the caseload increases that more mothers experience complications that prevent them from having more babies? Doctors simply get more practice and do more research to save lives and restore the mother's ability to have babies.

My wife has had 4 children, 3 of those C-sections. She has had two miscarriages, and I believe part of that is just our age and another part of it is from having C-sections. We'd feel differently if we were 10-15 years younger, but as it is we feel we're done having babies. I'm amazed having been present for two of those sections how quickly medicine and technology have changed, the level of skill and skillsets that have increased within only a few years. If only insurance wasn't such a burden... And sure, SOME women haven't been as fortunate as blessed as my wife has been. Nevertheless, to say that we MUST allow the murder of babies AT WILL just because SOME WOMEN will face difficulty or death is the stuff of myth and fantasy. An abortion can be performed in an emergency to save a woman's life. I'm unaware of any state with an abortion ban that would condemn pregnant women to death. I don't doubt getting an abortion is difficult for SOME WOMEN. So abortion can be reserved for these few exceptions and I have no problem with that. But demanding that states accept it as an option for any woman, any time, on-demand is just not workable in light of advances in medicine that can save the baby and mother, the availability of a support system such as churches and other community organizations that provides for the needs of mothers and babies, and the demand for adoption and an established foster care system. Abortion, with few, rare exceptions, is obsolete. Time to move forward.

But the United States is not East Asia or even Europe.

But yes, I think the line is somewhat negotiable, at least in the sense that we keep asking if personhood starts at fertilization. So we should be thinking maybe it makes better sense, is more reasonable, to draw the line at conception with conception being defined as when the embryo attaches to the womb. Anything beyond that is arbitrary.

It's been attempted to draw that line many times. At one point it was drawn at quickening. At another point in time it was when a heartbeat could be detected. I might add the condition that the baby is protected once it can be detected: missed period, positive pregnancy test, or otherwise. I admit that there is a little room for uncertainty here, but at the very least this is where the debate must start.

That means you don't believe women and girls should see their doctor for confirmation of pregnancy or prenatal checkups, because medical care would render them unable to terminate if the pregnancy wasn't viable, or if it was harmful to the mother's mental / physical health.

You think they can only terminate without medical care, before they know if they've even conceived.

Coat hanger, anyone?

I suggest the situation in non-U.S. regions only to illustrate that this is not to determine the truth, but to determine the law. This is not a universal concept.

Moreover, if we control for variables, this difference seems to be strongly related to Christianity/Abrahamic religion.

Therefore, we need to understand what the purpose of this matter is - to implement truth, morality, or religion.

Old people and those with intellectual disabilities are still sentient.

And no everything I am referring to is not a myth, it is current events.

Medical science is not so advanced that abortion is obsolete if anything that is a myth.

Myth, fluffy bunnies, unicorns and rainbows.

The sentience of the elderly and intellectually disabled in many case is indeterminable, same as babies. The same justification applies. So unless you accept that someone could one day judge your intellectual distinctiveness or disability as somehow less sentient or lacking in sentience and you would be ok with someone putting you out of your misery, metaphorically speaking, you can't logically be ok with abortion.

It's less that medical science is not so advanced, more that the pro-murder crowd refuses to acknowledge that, breakthroughs could possibly emerge that make abortion unnecessary--for instance, that babies are viable earlier than we believe right now, whether the unborn are sentient, and so forth. The most absurd arguments are that the unborn aren't even human. Of course, they are. And, to be honest, I don't even see sentience as relevant. All I see as relevant is whether the baby we're talking about it a new human organism. Sentience never makes any difference in the adult world--people in comas possibly lack sentience. People under anasthesia during surgery are incapable of demonstrating sentience. So I think sentience is really a poor standard to evaluate whether a human being has value. A human being has value because they are a human being. That is really the only standard anyone can consistently maintain--sentience, being relative and arbitrary, hardly represents any decent measure of human worth.

I understand that point. But how do people decide what is okay and what isn't if majority vote is not the way? If majority vote on deciding a matter is too risky, then how else do you decide then?

By interpreting the Constitution and the Bill of Rights.
They're meant to outlive anyone who would possibly vote in a referendum, or popular vote.

Well the supreme court interpreted that abortions were not protected under the 14th amendment, so is interpreting the constitution the best thing in that case, or all the time therefore?

The definition of life is a fundamental principle which needs to be applied equally for all Americans.

Appellants can challenge Constitutional decisions pertaining to discrimination, regardless of the Amendment.