[quote]pushharder wrote:
Varqanir wrote:
…I love children, just as I love dogs…
?
A vast gulf of immense proportions lies between us. [/quote]
Not so much as you might think.
[quote]pushharder wrote:
Varqanir wrote:
…If you’ve got a plan for what to do with an extra million babies a year in the US, I’d love to hear it…
[/quote]
Tax them.
[quote]FightinIrish26 wrote:
Aragorn wrote:
It also causes introspection, which is something most people wish to avoid on any serious basis.
Christ, talk about arrogance. You are no better or worse than 98 percent of the people out there. Get off your high horse.
This is also a largely apolitical characterization of the debate, although it is the proper one. a) is it or is it not human? b) is it or is it not a ‘person’? c) what are the prerequisites for legal protection of a person? and does it meet these criteria?
That is the question. And no, it is not a human until it develops a brain and some type of conciousness. That’s my opinion.
[/quote]
So you are against all abortions past week 4 of gestation? I am for that. That’s a good start.
[quote]tedro wrote:
pushharder wrote:
Varqanir wrote:
…If you’ve got a plan for what to do with an extra million babies a year in the US, I’d love to hear it…
Tax them.[/quote]
At the risk of having this thread devolve into a Freakonomics discussion, wouldn’t those million statistically be the least likely to pay taxes?
[quote]FightinIrish26 wrote:
pushharder wrote:
And according to your line of thinking at what point in this child’s life does it pass from “expendable depending on the circumstances albeit distressing” to “No, that’s out and out murder and it’s wrong”?
Eight months before birth? Three months? Three days?
Three days after birth? Three months? Eight months? Five years?
Isn’t that the great question, and the reason this debate still comes up?
The fact that people have widely varying answers, and they are, predominantly, based on emotion rather than facts, is what makes it impossible to satsify everyone.
In my view, and this is only my view, the only true fact is that whether abortion is legal or not, women will continue to have them. That puts the safety and health of every woman who chose to do this at risk. To me, that alone is reason enough to have them legal.
The only things you can have is abortion either completely legal, or completely illegal. Any other judgement is going to be based on very subjective analysis.
I have stated before that I opposed late term and partial birth abortions. But if we say that after the second trimester, folks like you will (reasonably) ask, “Who decided this day?”
Others will say, “What if it’s a week before the third trimester? Can you still get an abortion?”
A pandora’s box opens.
It is a precarious situation, but to me, the law must stand as it is. I don’t believe it’s ever going to change, either.[/quote]
If it is found or decided under consensus that aborting a fetus is the termination of a human life, then it will change. I really don’t see what’s hard about this. The only breaks in the chain of life are conception and death. Arguably, we are all still a clump of cells.
The is nothing precarious. A child in utero is either a human life or it is not. It is not part, half, or a tenth of a person. It is not a incomplete person, or something like a colon pollup.
So if it is a human life, then the question becomes, is it ok to take human life under certain circumstances? If yes, you are on a very slippery slope.
For anyone who’s interested, a few facts about abortion in the United States.
"The average woman who seeks an abortion is 24 years old, unwed, earns a yearly income of about $25,000, and
already is a mother. She is just as likely as not to have had a previous abortion.
"She has religious beliefs and is a Christian, more likely to be Protestant than Catholic. The typical abortion is performed around the 8th week, well within the first
trimester. She could be of any race. And, if she is a minor, her parents not only condoned her decision to have an
abortion, they may have demanded it.
There may be a variety of specific reasons behind her decision to have an abortion, but they are subsumed within one salient fact: the pregnancy was unwanted and
unplanned.
Half of all pregnancies are unplanned, and most unplanned pregnancies end in abortion. A modest 10% reduction in unplanned pregnancies would eliminate the need for 130,000 abortions each year. By way of comparison, this would eliminate as many abortions in three days as would banning late-term abortions over a full year. [Emphasis mine]
[quote]pat wrote:.
If it is found or decided under consensus that aborting a fetus is the termination of a human life, then it will change. I really don’t see what’s hard about this. The only breaks in the chain of life are conception and death. Arguably, we are all still a clump of cells. [/quote]
Unfortunately, Pat, I don’t think so.
It’s obviously easier to kill if you are able to think of your victim as less than human. This is true in war, where the governments on all sides expend great efforts on propaganda to dehumanize the enemy. It was true in Nazi Germany, as the Jews, Gypsies, homosexuals, and Slavs were all thought of as subhuman vermin. It’s the same attitude that allowed our forebears to exterminate the red man, and enslave the black man.
Aside from a few troglodytes over at Stormfront, this attitude is pretty much gone from America today, thank God.
However, the consciousness that the person in your sights is indeed human doesn’t always keep you from squeezing the trigger, if you’re determined to end that person’s life.
Similarly, just as the certainty that the newborn baby is human didn’t stop countless people in ALL cultures throughout history from (at worst) exposing unwanted babies to the elements, pitching them off cliffs, dunking them in buckets, or (at best) leaving them on the church steps.
Infanticide and abortion may be equally reprehensible to you. I’m not going to debate that point. My only point is that the reasons for infanticide/abortion have not changed appreciably since the first human female on earth had the first baby that was one more than the tribe could feed.
A sudden increase in people thinking of an unborn baby as “human” rather than “a clump of cells” is not, in my estimation, going to override any of those reasons.
And anyway, since when has passing a law against murder prevented murder?
Hmm. Now we’re drifting into more esoteric philosophical territory, Push.
Is a man who contemplates murder, but ultimately fails to carry out the deed, prevented primarily by the fact that it’s wrong, or that it’s illegal?
…or is the yella bastard just afeard o’ gettin’ caught?
That’s for another thread.
[quote]pushharder wrote:
And according to your line of thinking at what point in this child’s life does it pass from “expendable depending on the circumstances albeit distressing” to “No, that’s out and out murder and it’s wrong”?
Eight months before birth? Three months? Three days?
Three days after birth? Three months? Eight months? Five years?
[/quote]
There is no clear dividing line. An argument that makes a lot of sense to me is based on a current definition of death - brain “flat lines”:
Personhood is attained at about 22 weeks gestation:
This argument is based on the definition of death.
Ethicist D.A. Jones has written:
"Death is not just another disease that can be specified, analyzed, and catalogued as viral or bacterial, infectious or auto-immune. Death is the final cessation of life. Thus defining death requires more than medical and technical expertise: It requires also some agreed understanding of what is constitutive of human life, and what it is that must be absent before the person can be said to be dead."
"Sometimes it will be obvious to any reasonable observer that someone is dead, or alternatively, that someone is still alive. Someone who is breathing [without a respirator] and talking and walking around is obviously alive. Someone whose body is rotting away and hanging off the bones is obviously dead. However there are some cases, perhaps many cases, where it will not be obvious to an unqualified layman whether someone is alive or dead. In these cases it is the decision of competent physicians that decides the issue." 1
Prior to about 1960, a person would be declared dead if both their heartbeat and breathing had ceased and could not be re-started. But newer technological developments made this definition invalid. Heart pacemakers can keep the heart beating indefinitely long after all other internal systems have wound down. Respirators can keep the person apparently breathing forever.
Death is generally defined in most U.S. states as a situation in which the brain “flat-lines.” That is, there is no major central nervous system activity and there is no detectable electrical activity in the brain’s cerebral cortex. At this point, the person may be declared dead in many jurisdictions. The patient may appear to be breathing, as a result of the action of a respirator. Her/his heart may still be beating, either on its own or as a result of a heart pacemaker. But he/she is judged to be dead. Unplugging the patient from life support systems at this point will not actually kill the patient; she/he is already considered to be dead.
The great rise of transplant medicine has, then, been wholly dependent upon organ harvesting from so called ‘beating-heart cadavers’, that is, patients who are determined to be dead on the basis of brain death criteria. 1 But their hearts continue to beat (sometimes with external help), to keep the body’s organs fresh for transplanting.
If the point of death is defined as a lack of electrical activity in the brain’s cerebral cortex one might use the same criteria to define the start of human life. One might argue that fetal life becomes human person when electrical activity commences in the cerebral cortex. Human personhood, would then start when consciousness begins and ends when consciousness irrevocably ends. One could then argue that a fully-informed woman should have access to abortion at any point before the point that human personhood begins.
According to author Richard Carrier:
"...the fetus does not become truly neurologically active until the fifth month (an event we call 'quickening.' This activity might only be a generative one, i.e. the spontaneous nerve pulses could merely be autonomous or spontaneous reflexes aimed at stimulating and developing muscle and organ tissue. Nevertheless, it is in this month that a complex cerebral cortex, the one unique feature of human -- in contrast with animal -- brains, begins to develop, and is typically complete, though still growing, by the sixth month. What is actually going on mentally at that point is unknown, but the hardware is in place for a human mind to exist in at least a primitive state."
When medical ethicist Bonnie Steinbock was interviewed by Newsweek and asked the question “So when does life begin?,” she answered:
"If we�??re talking about life in the biological sense, eggs are alive, sperm are alive. Cancer tumors are alive. For me, what matters is this: When does it have the moral status of a human being? When does it have some kind of awareness of its surroundings? When it can feel pain, for example, because that�??s one of the most brute kinds of awareness there could be. And that happens, interestingly enough, just around the time of viability. It certainly doesn�??t happen with an embryo." 8
Under this argument, some primitive neurological activity in the cerebral cortex begins during the fifth month, conceivably as early as the 22nd week of pregnancy. If we allow a two week safety factor, then society could set the gestation time limit at which abortions should not be freely available at 20 weeks. Abortions could then be requested up to the start of the 20th week for normal pregnancies, or at a later time if unusual conditions existed. Many state and provincial medical associations in North America have actually adopted this limit, probably using a different rationale.
This time limit is very close to another dividing line - whether or not a fetus can survive outside of mothers body and is not that far from current from “no third-term abortions” policy.
[quote]pushharder wrote:
Varqanir wrote:
…And anyway, since when has passing a law against murder prevented murder?
Well, since the law passed. Now the number of murders prevented may be few. It may be some. It may be many. But I doubt I would be wrong in suggesting murder laws help prevent murder.[/quote]
Of the 1.2 million abortions committed I am sure relatively few of them believe they willfully committed murder. If they thought they were committing murder, then perhaps they might not do it. It is education…Look at slavery, in 21rst century eyes it’s an abomination. Back then for many it was just normal. It sounds sick now, but if they thought of slaves as equal to themselves they wouldn’t enslave them.
In both cases there is a lot of dehumanization and looking the other way. People often do not want to admit the truth because it means they may have to change. And nobody want’s to be like them.
[quote]skor wrote:
pushharder wrote:
And according to your line of thinking at what point in this child’s life does it pass from “expendable depending on the circumstances albeit distressing” to “No, that’s out and out murder and it’s wrong”?
Eight months before birth? Three months? Three days?
Three days after birth? Three months? Eight months? Five years?
There is no clear dividing line. An argument that makes a lot of sense to me is based on a current definition of death - brain “flat lines”:
Personhood is attained at about 22 weeks gestation:
This argument is based on the definition of death.
Ethicist D.A. Jones has written:
"Death is not just another disease that can be specified, analyzed, and catalogued as viral or bacterial, infectious or auto-immune. Death is the final cessation of life. Thus defining death requires more than medical and technical expertise: It requires also some agreed understanding of what is constitutive of human life, and what it is that must be absent before the person can be said to be dead."
"Sometimes it will be obvious to any reasonable observer that someone is dead, or alternatively, that someone is still alive. Someone who is breathing [without a respirator] and talking and walking around is obviously alive. Someone whose body is rotting away and hanging off the bones is obviously dead. However there are some cases, perhaps many cases, where it will not be obvious to an unqualified layman whether someone is alive or dead. In these cases it is the decision of competent physicians that decides the issue." 1
Prior to about 1960, a person would be declared dead if both their heartbeat and breathing had ceased and could not be re-started. But newer technological developments made this definition invalid. Heart pacemakers can keep the heart beating indefinitely long after all other internal systems have wound down. Respirators can keep the person apparently breathing forever.
Death is generally defined in most U.S. states as a situation in which the brain “flat-lines.” That is, there is no major central nervous system activity and there is no detectable electrical activity in the brain’s cerebral cortex. At this point, the person may be declared dead in many jurisdictions. The patient may appear to be breathing, as a result of the action of a respirator. Her/his heart may still be beating, either on its own or as a result of a heart pacemaker. But he/she is judged to be dead. Unplugging the patient from life support systems at this point will not actually kill the patient; she/he is already considered to be dead.
The great rise of transplant medicine has, then, been wholly dependent upon organ harvesting from so called ‘beating-heart cadavers’, that is, patients who are determined to be dead on the basis of brain death criteria. 1 But their hearts continue to beat (sometimes with external help), to keep the body’s organs fresh for transplanting.
If the point of death is defined as a lack of electrical activity in the brain’s cerebral cortex one might use the same criteria to define the start of human life. One might argue that fetal life becomes human person when electrical activity commences in the cerebral cortex. Human personhood, would then start when consciousness begins and ends when consciousness irrevocably ends. One could then argue that a fully-informed woman should have access to abortion at any point before the point that human personhood begins.
According to author Richard Carrier:
"...the fetus does not become truly neurologically active until the fifth month (an event we call 'quickening.' This activity might only be a generative one, i.e. the spontaneous nerve pulses could merely be autonomous or spontaneous reflexes aimed at stimulating and developing muscle and organ tissue. Nevertheless, it is in this month that a complex cerebral cortex, the one unique feature of human -- in contrast with animal -- brains, begins to develop, and is typically complete, though still growing, by the sixth month. What is actually going on mentally at that point is unknown, but the hardware is in place for a human mind to exist in at least a primitive state."
When medical ethicist Bonnie Steinbock was interviewed by Newsweek and asked the question “So when does life begin?,” she answered:
"If we�??re talking about life in the biological sense, eggs are alive, sperm are alive. Cancer tumors are alive. For me, what matters is this: When does it have the moral status of a human being? When does it have some kind of awareness of its surroundings? When it can feel pain, for example, because that�??s one of the most brute kinds of awareness there could be. And that happens, interestingly enough, just around the time of viability. It certainly doesn�??t happen with an embryo." 8
Under this argument, some primitive neurological activity in the cerebral cortex begins during the fifth month, conceivably as early as the 22nd week of pregnancy. If we allow a two week safety factor, then society could set the gestation time limit at which abortions should not be freely available at 20 weeks. Abortions could then be requested up to the start of the 20th week for normal pregnancies, or at a later time if unusual conditions existed. Many state and provincial medical associations in North America have actually adopted this limit, probably using a different rationale.
This time limit is very close to another dividing line - whether or not a fetus can survive outside of mothers body and is not that far from current from “no third-term abortions” policy.[/quote]
So they are defining human life as neurological activity? A fly has neurological activity, is it a human?
Pat,
I think definition of “person” is closely connected to a current definition of death. A brain dead person’s body can be maintained “alive” and functioning in order to be used for organ donation later. Doing that is not considered killing.
I don’t know specifics of flies biology. CNS activity and brain “waves” in a human body is what in today’s understanding separates a live and a dead person.
[quote]skor wrote:
Pat,
I think definition of “person” is closely connected to a current definition of death. A brain dead person’s body can be maintained “alive” and functioning in order to be used for organ donation later. Doing that is not considered killing.
I don’t know specifics of flies biology. CNS activity and brain “waves” in a human body is what in today’s understanding separates a live and a dead person.[/quote]
You missed the point. Placing the right to life on neurological activity is arbitrary. Neurological activity is seen throughout the animal kingdom, if this is the basis for determining the permissibility of killing, then there is not a logical way to exclude the killing of any individual in the animal kingdom that shows brain waves.
If you want to claim murder is wrong because it takes away one’s ability to be alive, and then claim their ability to be alive is determined by brain activity, then you have no provisions for excluding flies, or mice, or wild game.
If you want to go down this route, you must find a reason specific to humans as to why taking away life is wrong, and then show that an embryo or fetus does not have this provision that prevents the taking of their life from being morally permissible.
Alernately, you could simply make the argument that killing anything with neurological activity is wrong. If so, at least it will be simple to formulate a logical argument, I just hope you are able to live by your own philosophy. Also keep in mind that it is now logical to view the taking away of any individual’s nuerological activity as being equally morally wrong, and therefore should be equally punished. Again, as long as you can live by your philosophy in whole, I suppose it’s ok.
Tedro,
I can’t write an extensive reply at the moment, but I don’t think bringing animals into discussion makes a lot of sense as most humans are ok with killing animals. Meaning that whatever the definition of life is for animals (which can be different from “person”), humans are ok killing them.
Humans are a special case - we consider killing another person wrong. Brain activity is what today separates a “person” from just a “human body”. And we view “human body” without brain activity exactly as an animal - keeping it alive if needed, ending it’s (it = human body, not “person”) life if needed.
[quote]skor wrote:
Tedro,
I can’t write an extensive reply at the moment, but I don’t think bringing animals into discussion makes a lot of sense as most humans are ok with killing animals. Meaning that whatever the definition of life is for animals (which can be different from “person”), humans are ok killing them.
Humans are a special case - we consider killing another person wrong. Brain activity is what today separates a “person” from just a “human body”. And we view “human body” without brain activity exactly as an animal - keeping it alive if needed, ending it’s (it = human body, not “person”) life if needed.[/quote]
So you don’t think a right to life transcends DNA? What is so special about your genome that it is not morally permissible to kill you but it is a chimpanzee? Or a dolphin? Or a reincarnated cro-magnon?
Placing the right to life on DNA is every bit as arbitrary as placing it on neural activity.
[quote]tedro wrote:
skor wrote:
Tedro,
I can’t write an extensive reply at the moment, but I don’t think bringing animals into discussion makes a lot of sense as most humans are ok with killing animals. Meaning that whatever the definition of life is for animals (which can be different from “person”), humans are ok killing them.
Humans are a special case - we consider killing another person wrong. Brain activity is what today separates a “person” from just a “human body”. And we view “human body” without brain activity exactly as an animal - keeping it alive if needed, ending it’s (it = human body, not “person”) life if needed.
So you don’t think a right to life transcends DNA? What is so special about your genome that it is not morally permissible to kill you but it is a chimpanzee? Or a dolphin? Or a reincarnated cro-magnon?
Placing the right to life on DNA is every bit as arbitrary as placing it on neural activity.[/quote]
Does this mean I can’t eat fruit unless it falls from the tree on it’s own?
[quote]skor wrote:
Pat,
I think definition of “person” is closely connected to a current definition of death. A brain dead person’s body can be maintained “alive” and functioning in order to be used for organ donation later. Doing that is not considered killing.
I don’t know specifics of flies biology. CNS activity and brain “waves” in a human body is what in today’s understanding separates a live and a dead person.[/quote]
Defining a person based on what keeps or makes one alive is a tricky position to support. Sure if your brain is dead so are you, but if you heart stops, your equally dead. So we can say a the definition of a person is related to cardio/pulminary activity. Got to have that to live…Sure machines can do that for you, for a while, but dead is dead. The fetus gains neural just like a teenager gets sexually functional. Having or not have functions does not a person make.
I would argue that if the fetus failed to gain neural activity when it was supposed and it appears not likely to gain it, then the child is likely to be dead very shortly.