• Current Events & Politics
    Welcome Guest
    Please read before posting:
    Forum Guidelines Bluelight Rules
  • Current Events & Politics Moderators: tryptakid | Foreigner

Opinion To Be or Not To Be (An Abortion Thread)

JessFR said:
Another reason this frustrates me, is I feel I understand where pro choicers are coming from. I respect that they believe in good faith that the fetus doesn't have a right to continued existence for reasons they agree with.

I don't begrudge pro choicers for fighting for what they think is right, I just wish that respect were more frequently reciprocated.
Click to expand...
Sorry, Jess, but if you have had to fight every, second of everyday to have the right to your own body you may understand the pro-choice side. You live by and respect your beliefs, I am fine with that. But please Do Not inflick them on everyone else who may not follow your High and Mighty position?. You are on the side that is doing all the oppression ,
science has proven your beliefs wrong , you have a very spiritual heart , it shows in your your passion. But I must say if YOU don’t approve of abortions “ Don’t Have one” go any route you feel comfortable with, that’s your right. I am not telling you : how to raise,how to school, how much you must spend,what prep school and collage to attend, or even Keep the child, just put it out there and Hope it works out for the child !
 
Science can't have proven my position wrong because to do that would require proving scientifically that the fetus does not have the right to live.

That's not a scientifically testable hypothesis. The only way it can even begin to be right or wrong scientifically is to test the reasons one might believe it does or does not have the right to live. And most of those viewpoints aren't testable either.

It's like trying to scientifically prove exactly what the value is of a human life, you can't even try and do that without defining what it even means for a human life to have value.

And how exactly am I imposing my beliefs on you anyway? What, by having them? By believing you are morally wrong to have an abortion I'm imposing my beliefs on you? What crap.

And what, all the pro choice people here are endlessly fighting for right to their own body? Unlike me who's neeeeever had anyone violate or infringe my bodily rights. Give me a break and save your indignation.
 
Since we’re parsing terms, for a pregnancy to be successful, the fertilized egg has to implant in the uterus. If it doesn’t, it’s just expelled and it’s estimated that this happens about 1/3 of the time (some estimates are higher) after an egg is fertilized.

Implantation in the uterus happens six to twelve days after fertilization. Many of you are likely family with ectopic pregnancy, which is where a fertilized implants outside the uterus, like in the Fallopian tube. The fetus is removed because it is highly unlikely to survive and very likely to kill the mother by causing her to hemorrhage.

So this whole idea that viable life begins when sperm hits an egg is inaccurate and somewhat dramatic to me.

I just found this great page about spontaneous abortion in humans:

Spontaneous abortion in humans

A common fundamentalist argument against abortion is that each human being is granted a soul at the moment of conception, and that destroying that "soul" is equivalent to murder. Taking this logic further, the argument is that most methods of birth control are equivalent to mass murder with the...
rationalwiki.org rationalwiki.org

And when I use the word “parasite”, I’m using the scientific definition, which according to the CDC is “an organism that lives on or in a host organism and gets its food from or at the expense of its host”.

Therefore, according to this definition, disabled people are not parasites. They don’t rely on a host for oxygen or nutrients. Someone might need to help take care of them, but that someone can share caretaking duties with other people.

I can split more hairs, but I just wanted to make sure I was being clear with terminology and to illustrate that things are not as clear cut as they look.
 
cduggles said:
Since we’re parsing terms, for a pregnancy to be successful, the fertilized egg has to implant in the uterus. If it doesn’t, it’s just expelled and it’s estimated that this happens about 1/3 of the time (some estimates are higher) after an egg is fertilized.

Implantation in the uterus happens six to twelve days after fertilization. Many of you are likely family with ectopic pregnancy, which is where a fertilized implants outside the uterus, like in the Fallopian tube. The fetus is removed because it is highly unlikely to survive and very likely to kill the mother by causing her to hemorrhage.

So this whole idea that viable life begins when sperm hits an egg is inaccurate and somewhat dramatic to me.
Click to expand...

I am aware of this. But a fertilized egg failing to implant is little different to a miscarriage later in the pregnancy, other than that it's more common. It is out of our control.

People also often die of cancers and other diseases out of out control.

That people die and we can't prevent it does not invalidate the value of life. This is already pretty widely accepted among pro choicers for humans after they're born, I'm just applying it earlier.
 
JessFR said:
I am aware of this. But a fertilized egg failing to implant is little different to a miscarriage, other than that it's more common. It is out of our control.

People also often die of cancers and other diseases out of out control.

That people die and we can't prevent it does not invalidate the value of life. This is already pretty widely accepted among pro choicers for humans after they're born, I'm just applying it earlier.
Click to expand...
I think you’re applying it incorrectly. A miscarriage is defined as “the spontaneous, premature expulsion of a nonviable embryo or fetus from the uterus.”
A non-implanted fertilized egg passes through the uterus, but it’s not expelled from it. Miscarriage implies implantation has occurred.
 
cduggles said:
I think you’re applying it incorrectly. A miscarriage is defined as “the spontaneous, premature expulsion of a nonviable embryo or fetus from the uterus.”
A non-implanted fertilized egg passes through the uterus, but it’s not expelled from it. Miscarriage implies implantation has occurred.
Click to expand...

I am aware of the difference, I don't see how it changes anything I said though.

My point is, what happens that we have no control over in no way changes what value a fertilized embryo or fetus does or does not have.
 
I got pregnant at 17 and knew this was the last thing I should be dealing with but i was so young and scared. I knew as soon as I told my mom she'd take me straight to get an abortion and knowing that, I prolonged telling her without putting conscience effort into it. Deep down I knew I was trying to let enough time go by where an abortion would be impossible by the time she knew. Luckily I've always been tiny so I wasn't obviously showing until I was about 6 months along. She realized, asked me how far along I was and I pretended to be vague and not know. Went to the doc, found out i was 6 months along, first thing she said to the doc was what state will abort this far along? The doctor was shocked to say the least. Then her thing was pushing me to adopt, it was all she talked about. I just kinda went along without knowing what hell I wanted to do. Once I had my son and held him in my arms I knew I absolutely could not give him up. By then I was 18, but an 18 year old is in no way able to handle the emotions that come with having a first child and then having to make the ultimate sacrifice. I ended up keeping him and my mom kicked me out and called DCF hoping that would get my son taken. I had other family who had stepped in and offered support by then so the DCF worker was more than happy to let me keep my son and she, too, was appalled at my mom. She's a piece of work. Anyway, sorry to get way off topic but as for abortion - I know I personally could not have one. I don't think I could handle the aftermath and guilt. But I support another woman or girl's choice to have one, there's tons of situations where it's just not feasible to expect her to keep the baby without any money or outside support nor expect her to be able to give birth to her child then give it to someone else. Not to mention pregnancies that are the result of rape or incest. That's traumatic in so many ways and I would not blame anyone one bit for having an abortion in that case, especially a very young girl. These are all huge, personal choices that only the mother, and father if he's there, can make. Outside opinions mean fuck all.
 
JessFR said:
Please, one you guys on the pro choice side, at least tell me you comprehend what I'm getting at here?
Click to expand...
I do comprehend it.
JessFR said:
You build moral positions on top of a few basic assumptions.
Click to expand...
I don’t particularly find being pro choice to be a moral position. I think science supports it as a viable (bad pun unintentional 😕) position. I do think being prolife is problematic from a moral standpoint, particularly in cases of rape, and here I of course include incest.

JessFR said:
"I don't believe the fetus has rights because the fetus doesn't have rights" essentially is.
Click to expand...
I believe the rights of the woman who is pregnant supersede the rights of the fetus. I don’t believe this because of a moral value, I believe because of neuroscience and developmental biology.
Xorkoth said:
There are so many humans, too many. And there are already far too many unwanted children for them to all be adopted. Anyone who doesn't feel like they could raise a child effectively, and decides to get an abortion, is being responsible, IMO. There are already SO many kids born who no one wants
Click to expand...
I agree that there are too many people, and that there are so many kids no one wants. It’s why the foster care system is alive and well in America.
JessFR said:
You're saying a fertilized embryo isn't alive?
Click to expand...
I believe it is not until it successfully implants and even then it isn’t independently alive. It’s alive the way a virus that has infected a cell is alive, to me.
JessFR said:
You can't be forced to render aid to someone drowning (at least in most American jurisprudence, there are other countries with different views), but you can be held responsible if you pushed them in the water to start with.
Click to expand...
Well, in the case of rape, who gets pushed in the water?
JessFR said:
My point is that you can't say you don't think the fetus being a life or not is relevant, because regardless of if you realize it its virtually certain that you are basing your moral beliefs off that underlying opinion.
Click to expand...
I really don’t see abortion as a moral issue until the fetus is independently viable, and even then I think the woman’s rights supersede the rights of the fetus. But I could be convinced that third trimester abortion should not be allowed in most cases (although most cases of third trimester abortion have to with fetuses that are not viable and sparing the parents some agony. I’ve posted extensively about this before, so I’m not going through it again).
JessFR said:
Which is a whole issue of its own for people to debate.
Click to expand...
On a lighter note, I was actually forced to defend the position that using stem cells derived from frozen fertilized embryos (which I don’t consider alive) is immoral. We had a debate in class, and I had to defend this position to a bunch of uber liberals. I didn’t win but I got over 1/3 of the votes, which no one expected.
All my group members chose me to defend that position for some reason, and I was not happy.
 
cduggles said:
I believe the rights of the woman who is pregnant supersede the rights of the fetus. I don’t believe this because of a moral value, I believe because of neuroscience and developmental biology.
Click to expand...

I'm gonna skip the rest of this post, for now at least, I'm getting tired and I can feel my ability to argue is deteriorating (see the stupid joke about placentas for what happens when I start to get tired and my mental "maybe don't say whatever pops into your head" filter starts to wear out for the day :)).

But I will say, with respect, of course it's a moral value. You are using neuroscience and developmental biology to come to that moral value, but it's still a moral value. Even if you use science to come to it, hell even if you can go so far as to call it objectively correct, it's still a moral value. Because you're assigning the fetus continued existence a lower moral importance than the consequences for the mother.

Science doesn't say that one has greater moral value than the other because science isn't concerned with moral estimations. Id argue what you're actually doing is using your interpretations of how the science related to morality to create a moral estimation.

Ugh I probably shoulda let that till tomorrow do I feel like I butchered that explanation. :p
 
Science does say one is far more neurologically developed and able to live a non-parasitic existence. The idea that an adult has more rights than a fetus could be considered a moral position, I guess. But there’s one hell of a good objective case for it.
 
cduggles said:
Science does say one is far more neurologically developed and able to live a non-parasitic existence. The idea that an adult has more rights than a fetus could be considered a moral position, I guess. But there’s one hell of a good objective case for it.
Click to expand...

That's my point yeah. Science says one is more neurologically developed and self sustaining, but it will never have anything to say about what that implies as far as its worth as a life.

You have to take an existing moral belief that those attributes, such as neurological development in fetal development, is related to life being worthy of a right to continued existence. That's a moral position though not a scientific one.

I'm of the view that as far as fetal development goes, neurological development doesn't have as strong a relationship to the life's right to ongoing existence. I place a higher initial right to ongoing life right from the get go.

Now excuse me while I leave my right wing pro life argument to go back to my left wing anti republican argument, I shall return shortly. :d
 
It seems to me that using the extent of neurological development (almost none vs highly advanced) as an objective determinant makes more sense scientifically, whereas using a somewhat vague definition of “living” is much more subjective.
 
cduggles said:
It seems to me that using the extent of neurological development (almost none vs highly advanced) as an objective determinant makes more sense scientifically, whereas using a somewhat vague definition of “living” is much more subjective.
Click to expand...

This whole thing is subjective. You can use objective observations to inform those subjective conclusions, but they're still gonna be subjective.

There's no way to objectively quantify the value of a fetus vs the value of the mother's right to autonomy.
 
cduggles said:
But the fetus isn’t autonomous. Even at 22 weeks + until birth it’s not self-sufficient. It depends on the woman entirely for oxygen and nutrients and a protective environment.
Click to expand...

In addition to birdups point, which I agree with, I feel again inclined to say that these are again fairly objective observations, but the subjective moral conclusion is still just that, subjective.

Regardless though as birdup points out the amount of external care a human needs doesn't just suddenly disappear, it gradually drops from being totally dependant in its mother physically, to being dependant on someone to feed and care for it, etc etc.

Almost everything with human development is a gradual process, and the only major points are conception, implantation, and delivery. Drawing a line somewhere in between is pretty arbitrary, and few people approve of abortion all the way up until delivery. I would hope anyway.
 
Funny thing is with Jess, we totally agree here. Like we totally click. Your views are mine. Then we go over the fence to other stuff, like that Trump phone call. It's like the Twilight Zone. @Xorkoth said that I think. It doesn't become less weird from my side. I totally don't understand how two people can look at the same thing and have wildly different interpretations. It's bizarre... and I get that it's not just you or me. It's a population of hundreds of millions divided down the middle. One of them sees one thing; the other, sees the other.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Top