We do not know when a person starts to be a person. Conception? 2 hours? 15 days? We have no idea. We cannot know. The human being does not know everything. Assume it.
Then, just in case, let us be cautious and do not kill from the very beginning.
and so, if some believe in reincarnation and therefore that a bug might be my grandmother and demand that you not step on it, are we to accept a similar deference to the precautionary principle?
why not sperm or ovum?
mandating that a society moves at the speed of its most cautious regardless of what most feel seems a fraught idea. try applying this logic as a general case, and i think that emerges.
shall we presume guilt and not innocence for crimes? let's be cautious and presume you are a thief?
shall we always presume harm in torts?
this idea that we must always try to avoid some assumed possible harm at the expense of all other values has been abused terribly in health policy these last 2 years. is expanding this thinking to other spheres desirable or wise?
one might also argue that if we're going to err toward caution, we should err toward the rights and agency of the being we KNOW to be sentient (the mother) as opposed to 20 barely differentiated cells in a womb.
this feels like using a rhetorical and logical sleight of hand to pass off the subjective as the objective by claiming "let's be safe" and simply defining safety along only one axis while ignoring all others.
Sperm and eggs apart will not become a human being. Add them together and voila!...life begins.
Religion need not enter into the debate as to when life begins. Until it became political, life beginning at conception was an uncontroversial point, taught even at my state university's biology classes.
this seems like a false equivalence of potential with current status.
i might one day be a doctor. do i get the right to prescribe drugs as a result of that?
you might one day steal a car.
shall we arrest you for grand theft auto just to be safe?
it was ALWAYS political.
before it was popular to demand that parents provide care for children, many societies treated them as chattel and outright property much as we currently treat cattle.
others allowed movement from "person" to "slave" and back again or claimed that some live humans were people and others were not.
one may find all manner of historical practice to which to appeal.
There is no false equivalence in this comment. Sperm and egg are not life. When they meet, they are life. This is the only logical beginning of life, in which we mean a unique human with their own DNA.
Gato, yours is the false equivalence. Prescribing meds is based on attained knowledge. Cells rapidly dividing are living, period. Not potentially. By definition.
My claim is based on science, not historical practice. Sperm + Egg is when life begins; it's not a matter of potential; it IS human life. Egg and sperm apart are potential life.
As to the barbarism of days of yore, the God of Abraham and Isaac slammed the brakes on child sacrifice. The dignity of each person and the notion of human rights are, very much, Christian principles arising from the Jewish tradition. The excellent historian Tom Holland wrote a book a few years ago (Dominion) that explores these topics. An atheist, he finds himself going to church regularly now. He is on the same path that CS Lewis and Malcolm Muggeridge took before him.
You wrote a few days earlier that the right to speak freely must be absolute; the right to life is even more important. This is not a deistic position; many atheists are pro-life--the late civil libertarian Nat Hentoff, for example. For atheist co-founder of NARAL, Bernard Nathanson, ultrasound technology led to his conversion to the pro-life cause (and eventually to Catholicism). The "it's just a clump of cells" argument was rendered nonsensical by the images of what was clearly and obviously a tiny human being. And this is at the stage when most abortions are performed.
Nietzsche wrote that, "If you give up Christian faith, you pull the right to Christian morality out from under your feet. The morality is simply not self-evident: one has to bring this point home again and again, despite English dimwits." The notion of each human having dignity and deserving respect is a religious statement. I have a grudging respect for atheists who admit that they hold human life in no special regard.
With what's going on in the world, I fear that we are going to find out that "without God, all is permissible," as Dostoevsky wrote in "The Brothers Karamazov.'
ThatтАЩs a straw man. If you are not actually a doctor you, canтАЩt prescribe drugs.
While I very uncomfortably support very early choice, at the moment of conception a unique human life with unique DNA is actually created, objectively. At the moment if implantation that human being is living. To ignore this is to ignore actual known scientific facts.
I find all this back-and-forth on the issue of when life begins to be irrelevant to the core issue.
Abortion is a sticky wicket because there is an intersection of, and conflict between, the rights of the mother and those of her fetus.
The only way to resolve this conflict is to favor the rights of one party at the expense of the other. Either the woman can kill the fetus, violating its fundamental right to live, or be forced to carry the fetus full-term, thus violating her rights to bodily autonomy.
Regardless of where one comes down, this is the fundamental issue.
So the real question is *who decides*?
In my view, it must be the woman, perhaps in consultation with her family and doctor if she so chooses, but in the end, it has to be her call.
I find this conclusion uncomfortable, but one thing I know for certain is that it is not my call, and sure as hell isn't some politician's.
i suspect you would not allow a woman to decide to kill her 3 month old child or to simply drop one 5 feet onto the sidewalk because her bodily autonomy allows it.
does an unborn entity of, say, 5 months possess no rights?
if one were to slip this woman ru486 and cause fatal miscarriage, would that be murder?
because the idea that she can end that pregnancy and commit no crime but that someone else could not would seem to pose a contradiction.
it can't be murder if you kill them but not if i do.
how do we resolve that?
this is why i think defining the moment of personhood is the key.
once we do that, the contradictions and the precedence of rights and values gets resolved.
Of course I would not allow the killing of a 3 month old child. Once the child is born, it is no longer a part of the woman's body and thus the conflict between the fundamental rights of the mother and the fetus no longer exists.
As a human being, the fetus possesses the same rights as the born, but again, in the case of pregnancy, the mother's right to control her own body, which is fundamental, cannot be fully exercised without violating the right of the fetus to live.
So, again, the fundamental question becomes, who decides and enforces that decision?
The same question applies to the determination of personhood.
My instincts and emotions would legally favor the fetus over the mother, but intellectually I am hesitant to place my judgment above the mother's in this matter, particularly in a blanket fashion.
Equally important, I know that empowering the State to regulate such things is fraught with danger, which I think the last two years have shown beyond a shadow of a doubt.
Certainly, reasonable people can disagree on this.
As for the ru486 scenario, that is clearly a violation of the rights of both the mother and the fetus and the perpetrator should be dealt with accordingly.
Sex is a contract. Having sex might result in a baby. That is the express purpose of sex. Virtually everyone knows this. When you have sex, you sign a contract that says тАЬI might get pregnant from this action. I agree to this possibility.тАЭ Whether or not you like it, you have signed it. YouтАЩre basically signing away the right of bodily autonomy for a little while in the event you do get pregnant.
Being pregnant is not permanent. ItтАЩs over in 40 weeks. Being aborted is permanent. When life and death are involved, that trumps the inconvenience of being pregnant for less than a year.
Hard to argue with that last point. That is to say that conception is clearly objective. So what is the purpose of conceiving... create a human being, an offspring.
LetтАЩs be clear, in the case of the fetus, we are talking about the life or death of humanityтАЩs most defenseless member. For the mother, weтАЩre talking about the inconvenience of carrying and delivering a child, who previously had the rights and agency not to get pregnant in the first place. She is not required to keep the child. When weтАЩre talking about life or death, the precautionary principle takes precedence over inconvenience.
And how long are there just a few undifferentiated cells in a womb? The clock quickly runs out on that argument.
Lol. ItтАЩs not a picnic but compared to dismembering a child, yeah itтАЩs just an inconvenience. Especially with modern pain medicine. Source: myself.
That is your opinion. Others may feel differently. In a free society, they would have the right to decide for themselves, not be forced by the government to carry a pregnancy to term against their will.
That is the whole point of my argument. I respect your opinion and your right to decide for yourself. I ask that you do the same for others, but you are not willing to.
You said the mother "had the rights and agency not to get pregnant in the first place". Contraception is imperfect, so the only way for a fertile woman to avoid getting pregnant for sure is to not have sex. So you are proposing that women who do not want a child (or another child) completely abstain from sex? For perhaps decades? Even if married?
Would you propose the same for men who do not want to father a child - complete abstention from intercourse with women of child-bearing age? Again, even if married?
Even if you would advocate for such a vast social change, I challenge you to provide me with one example of a society, in any historical period, where such a massive absention from sex occurred. I certainly can't think of one, and would suggest that such a proposal is completely unrealistic.
тАЬ So you are proposing that women who do not want a child (or another child) completely abstain from sex?тАЭ
If they donтАЩt want to deal with the potential consequences of sex, then yes.
тАЬ Would you propose the same for men who do not want to father a child - complete abstention from intercourse with women of child-bearing age?тАЭ
If they donтАЩt want to deal with the potential consequences of sex, then yes.
In reality, people donтАЩt have to abstain from sex. They just have to not kill the child they created from sex. They do not then have to raise the child. ThatтАЩs what adoption is for.
And I would encourage you to research postpartum abstinence. Many cultures abstained from sex after the birth of a child to practice ideal child spacing.
"that a bug might be my grandmother" In that case, step on it and give the bug a better life as a lizard or whatever!
I don't find the comparison with the last 2 years of application. Vaccines do not protect, as we have witnessed. Not killing a baby protects the baby 100%.
This issue is so important (I really appreciate any help I got back then to not get aborted so I can enjoy what was my only opportunity to enjoy this life) and the abortion is so terribly effective that precautionary principle is in my opinion required. Also remember, pregnancy does not come from fairies. You can avoid it.
One shall not kill. No matter the size of the victim. If we start debating who can be killed, we are terribly lost.
PS: this issue creates some division between us. Is the timing a coincidence?
One can make the argument that everything is connected. You wouldn't be here without your parents, and their parents, and their parents, back to the beginning of humanity. Humans wouldn't exist without the evolution of life that birthed them. And no life happens without this earth, this solar system, this galaxy, this universe. When did life ultimately start? When everything else did.
There is other approach.
We do not know when a person starts to be a person. Conception? 2 hours? 15 days? We have no idea. We cannot know. The human being does not know everything. Assume it.
Then, just in case, let us be cautious and do not kill from the very beginning.
and so, if some believe in reincarnation and therefore that a bug might be my grandmother and demand that you not step on it, are we to accept a similar deference to the precautionary principle?
why not sperm or ovum?
mandating that a society moves at the speed of its most cautious regardless of what most feel seems a fraught idea. try applying this logic as a general case, and i think that emerges.
shall we presume guilt and not innocence for crimes? let's be cautious and presume you are a thief?
shall we always presume harm in torts?
this idea that we must always try to avoid some assumed possible harm at the expense of all other values has been abused terribly in health policy these last 2 years. is expanding this thinking to other spheres desirable or wise?
one might also argue that if we're going to err toward caution, we should err toward the rights and agency of the being we KNOW to be sentient (the mother) as opposed to 20 barely differentiated cells in a womb.
this feels like using a rhetorical and logical sleight of hand to pass off the subjective as the objective by claiming "let's be safe" and simply defining safety along only one axis while ignoring all others.
Sperm and eggs apart will not become a human being. Add them together and voila!...life begins.
Religion need not enter into the debate as to when life begins. Until it became political, life beginning at conception was an uncontroversial point, taught even at my state university's biology classes.
this seems like a false equivalence of potential with current status.
i might one day be a doctor. do i get the right to prescribe drugs as a result of that?
you might one day steal a car.
shall we arrest you for grand theft auto just to be safe?
it was ALWAYS political.
before it was popular to demand that parents provide care for children, many societies treated them as chattel and outright property much as we currently treat cattle.
others allowed movement from "person" to "slave" and back again or claimed that some live humans were people and others were not.
one may find all manner of historical practice to which to appeal.
that renders none of it valid.
There is no false equivalence in this comment. Sperm and egg are not life. When they meet, they are life. This is the only logical beginning of life, in which we mean a unique human with their own DNA.
Exactly right. I am endlessly baffled at how so many people resort to sophistry to deny this reality.
Absolutely. It feels like the same mental gymnastics people use when they try to define 6,000 genders.
Gato, yours is the false equivalence. Prescribing meds is based on attained knowledge. Cells rapidly dividing are living, period. Not potentially. By definition.
so then would be a tumor, no?
cancer?
glioblastoma?
Those cells are living, but they are not human life. Cancer cells do not develop into human beings. A fertilized egg, undisturbed, will.
тАЬPrescribing meds is based on attained knowledge.тАЭ?
Think twice!
My claim is based on science, not historical practice. Sperm + Egg is when life begins; it's not a matter of potential; it IS human life. Egg and sperm apart are potential life.
As to the barbarism of days of yore, the God of Abraham and Isaac slammed the brakes on child sacrifice. The dignity of each person and the notion of human rights are, very much, Christian principles arising from the Jewish tradition. The excellent historian Tom Holland wrote a book a few years ago (Dominion) that explores these topics. An atheist, he finds himself going to church regularly now. He is on the same path that CS Lewis and Malcolm Muggeridge took before him.
this is a fully presumed conclusion and a presumed equivalence of "cell division" meaning "personhood."
why should a set of dividing cells with no consciousness be ascribed personhood and rights?
by what objective standard can it assent to a social contract?
deistic references will carry no weight with those who do not share a similar faith.
unless you propose coercive theocracy, that cannot really help us here.
Talk of "personhood" drags the discussion of from science to philosophy. The central point is that life does begin at conception: https://pjmedia.com/news-and-politics/tyler-o-neil/2019/07/13/study-95-percent-of-biologists-say-life-begins-at-conception-n67202
You wrote a few days earlier that the right to speak freely must be absolute; the right to life is even more important. This is not a deistic position; many atheists are pro-life--the late civil libertarian Nat Hentoff, for example. For atheist co-founder of NARAL, Bernard Nathanson, ultrasound technology led to his conversion to the pro-life cause (and eventually to Catholicism). The "it's just a clump of cells" argument was rendered nonsensical by the images of what was clearly and obviously a tiny human being. And this is at the stage when most abortions are performed.
Nietzsche wrote that, "If you give up Christian faith, you pull the right to Christian morality out from under your feet. The morality is simply not self-evident: one has to bring this point home again and again, despite English dimwits." The notion of each human having dignity and deserving respect is a religious statement. I have a grudging respect for atheists who admit that they hold human life in no special regard.
With what's going on in the world, I fear that we are going to find out that "without God, all is permissible," as Dostoevsky wrote in "The Brothers Karamazov.'
ThatтАЩs a straw man. If you are not actually a doctor you, canтАЩt prescribe drugs.
While I very uncomfortably support very early choice, at the moment of conception a unique human life with unique DNA is actually created, objectively. At the moment if implantation that human being is living. To ignore this is to ignore actual known scientific facts.
ItтАЩs worth recalling that being and non-being arenтАЩt the only possibilities. Something can exist as a potentiality.
Like Schr├╢dinger's cat.
I find all this back-and-forth on the issue of when life begins to be irrelevant to the core issue.
Abortion is a sticky wicket because there is an intersection of, and conflict between, the rights of the mother and those of her fetus.
The only way to resolve this conflict is to favor the rights of one party at the expense of the other. Either the woman can kill the fetus, violating its fundamental right to live, or be forced to carry the fetus full-term, thus violating her rights to bodily autonomy.
Regardless of where one comes down, this is the fundamental issue.
So the real question is *who decides*?
In my view, it must be the woman, perhaps in consultation with her family and doctor if she so chooses, but in the end, it has to be her call.
I find this conclusion uncomfortable, but one thing I know for certain is that it is not my call, and sure as hell isn't some politician's.
this seems a difficult framing.
i suspect you would not allow a woman to decide to kill her 3 month old child or to simply drop one 5 feet onto the sidewalk because her bodily autonomy allows it.
does an unborn entity of, say, 5 months possess no rights?
if one were to slip this woman ru486 and cause fatal miscarriage, would that be murder?
because the idea that she can end that pregnancy and commit no crime but that someone else could not would seem to pose a contradiction.
it can't be murder if you kill them but not if i do.
how do we resolve that?
this is why i think defining the moment of personhood is the key.
once we do that, the contradictions and the precedence of rights and values gets resolved.
Of course I would not allow the killing of a 3 month old child. Once the child is born, it is no longer a part of the woman's body and thus the conflict between the fundamental rights of the mother and the fetus no longer exists.
As a human being, the fetus possesses the same rights as the born, but again, in the case of pregnancy, the mother's right to control her own body, which is fundamental, cannot be fully exercised without violating the right of the fetus to live.
So, again, the fundamental question becomes, who decides and enforces that decision?
The same question applies to the determination of personhood.
My instincts and emotions would legally favor the fetus over the mother, but intellectually I am hesitant to place my judgment above the mother's in this matter, particularly in a blanket fashion.
Equally important, I know that empowering the State to regulate such things is fraught with danger, which I think the last two years have shown beyond a shadow of a doubt.
Certainly, reasonable people can disagree on this.
As for the ru486 scenario, that is clearly a violation of the rights of both the mother and the fetus and the perpetrator should be dealt with accordingly.
Sex is a contract. Having sex might result in a baby. That is the express purpose of sex. Virtually everyone knows this. When you have sex, you sign a contract that says тАЬI might get pregnant from this action. I agree to this possibility.тАЭ Whether or not you like it, you have signed it. YouтАЩre basically signing away the right of bodily autonomy for a little while in the event you do get pregnant.
Being pregnant is not permanent. ItтАЩs over in 40 weeks. Being aborted is permanent. When life and death are involved, that trumps the inconvenience of being pregnant for less than a year.
You are entitled to your opinion which is sound, and I don't necessarily disagree.
What you are not, or at least should not, be entitled to, is to impose your opinion on others, either personally or by proxy via the State.
Hard to argue with that last point. That is to say that conception is clearly objective. So what is the purpose of conceiving... create a human being, an offspring.
Exactly. There is no reason to believe that life does NOT begin at conception, unless you have an agenda.
Add them together with implantation.
Spot on Doc.
LetтАЩs be clear, in the case of the fetus, we are talking about the life or death of humanityтАЩs most defenseless member. For the mother, weтАЩre talking about the inconvenience of carrying and delivering a child, who previously had the rights and agency not to get pregnant in the first place. She is not required to keep the child. When weтАЩre talking about life or death, the precautionary principle takes precedence over inconvenience.
And how long are there just a few undifferentiated cells in a womb? The clock quickly runs out on that argument.
Agree. Unbelievable that the decision based on the future inconvenience of the mother has stood for even this long.
Anyone who thinks carrying a child for nine months and giving birth is a mere "inconvenience" clearly knows little about pregnancy and delivery.
Lol. ItтАЩs not a picnic but compared to dismembering a child, yeah itтАЩs just an inconvenience. Especially with modern pain medicine. Source: myself.
That is your opinion. Others may feel differently. In a free society, they would have the right to decide for themselves, not be forced by the government to carry a pregnancy to term against their will.
That is the whole point of my argument. I respect your opinion and your right to decide for yourself. I ask that you do the same for others, but you are not willing to.
ItтАЩs an inconvenience at worst and IтАЩve done it twice.
I get that you view it as an inconvience, but that is not the case for most of the world.
I completely agree. I am just quoting the reasoning behind Roe.
Or about the heavy responsibility of raising a child.
Adoption.
No one is forcing anyone to raise a child.
You said the mother "had the rights and agency not to get pregnant in the first place". Contraception is imperfect, so the only way for a fertile woman to avoid getting pregnant for sure is to not have sex. So you are proposing that women who do not want a child (or another child) completely abstain from sex? For perhaps decades? Even if married?
Would you propose the same for men who do not want to father a child - complete abstention from intercourse with women of child-bearing age? Again, even if married?
Even if you would advocate for such a vast social change, I challenge you to provide me with one example of a society, in any historical period, where such a massive absention from sex occurred. I certainly can't think of one, and would suggest that such a proposal is completely unrealistic.
тАЬ So you are proposing that women who do not want a child (or another child) completely abstain from sex?тАЭ
If they donтАЩt want to deal with the potential consequences of sex, then yes.
тАЬ Would you propose the same for men who do not want to father a child - complete abstention from intercourse with women of child-bearing age?тАЭ
If they donтАЩt want to deal with the potential consequences of sex, then yes.
In reality, people donтАЩt have to abstain from sex. They just have to not kill the child they created from sex. They do not then have to raise the child. ThatтАЩs what adoption is for.
And I would encourage you to research postpartum abstinence. Many cultures abstained from sex after the birth of a child to practice ideal child spacing.
"that a bug might be my grandmother" In that case, step on it and give the bug a better life as a lizard or whatever!
I don't find the comparison with the last 2 years of application. Vaccines do not protect, as we have witnessed. Not killing a baby protects the baby 100%.
This issue is so important (I really appreciate any help I got back then to not get aborted so I can enjoy what was my only opportunity to enjoy this life) and the abortion is so terribly effective that precautionary principle is in my opinion required. Also remember, pregnancy does not come from fairies. You can avoid it.
One shall not kill. No matter the size of the victim. If we start debating who can be killed, we are terribly lost.
PS: this issue creates some division between us. Is the timing a coincidence?
I love your quip about stepping on the bug and I agree 100%!
Sounds familiar, the same slight of hand for multiple issues.
One can make the argument that everything is connected. You wouldn't be here without your parents, and their parents, and their parents, back to the beginning of humanity. Humans wouldn't exist without the evolution of life that birthed them. And no life happens without this earth, this solar system, this galaxy, this universe. When did life ultimately start? When everything else did.