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.
That too is your opinion. The state imposed itself on us in all sorts of ways. Murdering an innocent human being is well within the borders of any society-wife legal framework, which is why only 6 countries in Earth, including the U.S., allow abortion beyond 18 weeks.
Moreover, even to take your bodily autonomy argument, that applies to zero abortions beyond 10 weeks. Once a woman knows, or should know with any degree of individual responsibility or concern for her body, it is reasonable to balance those two conflicting rights by an assertion at that point to either have an abortion or not. Aborting a 15 week old human being by tearing it apart limb from limb is not justified by bodily autonomy because at that point the mother is, at best, indifferent to the living human being she has knowingly carried for months before deciding to murder that human, and in the process ensured that living human being was subjected to blatant torture in the process. Women know if they have had sex. When we are talking about killing a living human being, I was too lazy to get a pregnancy test isnтАЩt a justification.
Do you even have the guts to scroll down to what an actual tortured and aborted baby looks like?
You can look, by age, at what you propose society has no interest in..... I encourage you to expand even the 4 month fetus. ItтАЩs easy to say тАЬitтАЩs a womanтАЩs body.тАЭ I once did. But people with more guts than me challenged me to observe the outcome and see if I still felt that way. I donтАЩt.
Why not? We have laws against murder, harming others, robbery, tax evasion, etc. why is this any different?
We need to remember that outlawing abortion means stopping doctors from performing the procedure or prescribing medicine to accomplish the same. Doctors are not allowed to do all kinds of things already.
I think youтАЩre inflating the womanтАЩs rights and downplaying the rights of the fetus. Also IтАЩm not so against the state as you. But youтАЩre entitled to your opinion. Thanks for the discussion.
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.
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.
That too is your opinion. The state imposed itself on us in all sorts of ways. Murdering an innocent human being is well within the borders of any society-wife legal framework, which is why only 6 countries in Earth, including the U.S., allow abortion beyond 18 weeks.
Moreover, even to take your bodily autonomy argument, that applies to zero abortions beyond 10 weeks. Once a woman knows, or should know with any degree of individual responsibility or concern for her body, it is reasonable to balance those two conflicting rights by an assertion at that point to either have an abortion or not. Aborting a 15 week old human being by tearing it apart limb from limb is not justified by bodily autonomy because at that point the mother is, at best, indifferent to the living human being she has knowingly carried for months before deciding to murder that human, and in the process ensured that living human being was subjected to blatant torture in the process. Women know if they have had sex. When we are talking about killing a living human being, I was too lazy to get a pregnancy test isnтАЩt a justification.
Do you even have the guts to scroll down to what an actual tortured and aborted baby looks like?
You can look, by age, at what you propose society has no interest in..... I encourage you to expand even the 4 month fetus. ItтАЩs easy to say тАЬitтАЩs a womanтАЩs body.тАЭ I once did. But people with more guts than me challenged me to observe the outcome and see if I still felt that way. I donтАЩt.
https://wisconsinrighttolife.org/pictures-of-aborted-babies-view
https://www.lifesitenews.com/news/dead-babies-found-in-dc-apartment-may-have-been-victims-of-infanticide-following-abortion-attempts/
No need to be insulting. I have "the guts" and have seen more than my share of it.
Let me be clear: abortion is a terrible thing and I am not in favor of it, and would not have one were I a woman.
But far worse is giving the State the power to regulate people's medical choices and bodily autonomy.
As an Ancap, this is the only logical position I can come to, as uncomfortable and unsatisfying as it is.
So when specifically do women lose the right to kill their children?
Why not? We have laws against murder, harming others, robbery, tax evasion, etc. why is this any different?
We need to remember that outlawing abortion means stopping doctors from performing the procedure or prescribing medicine to accomplish the same. Doctors are not allowed to do all kinds of things already.
It is different because unlike your examples, we are dealing with an irreconcilable conflict between the rights of two human beings.
You appear to advocate the State protect those of the fetus over those of the mother. Fine.
I don't think the State should have the power to regulate any aspect of personal lives.
I simply cannot endorse any sort of State coercion.
Lib├йrtate, what was your opinion on тАЬvaccinesтАЭ & mandates that everyone on the planet submit?
I think youтАЩre inflating the womanтАЩs rights and downplaying the rights of the fetus. Also IтАЩm not so against the state as you. But youтАЩre entitled to your opinion. Thanks for the discussion.
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.