Yes, I do. But, better is subjective with no right or wrong.
I have two answers to this dilemma really. Would I make a deal to end abortion for the most part and give you what you want if you give me (us) what we want? I certainly wouldn’t discount the idea. Especially if it would expedite the process.
However, as you can guess, I am adverse to a single payer system. But I certainly would be open to providing pregnancy and post- pregnancy assistance to those who would qualify to need such things.
And I have also seen first hand at title 1 schools how crappy some parents are and how just terrifyingly bad some people are to their kids. It’s horrible, but it’s not the conversation, really. Besides, those mothers could have had an abortion and didn’t.
It’s super sad, but besides the point.
I apologize if I came off dismissive or arrogant. That wasn’t my intention.
Meh, it directly takes 600k innocent human lives per year. Are we weighing in the human lives killed?
Yes, abortion disproportionately kills certain…ahem…demographics, disproportionately represented in crime statistics. Which is what we’re really talking about here.
How about doing away with with much of the war on drugs which has made a disproportionate amount of these disproportionately represented folks into career criminals.
The argument was sans fetal human rights.
I believe in fetal human rights at some developmental point and the ability to perform live delivery rather than abortion would trump woman’s bodily autonomy argument. The court could rule that inside the woman’s body is not under the jurisdiction of US or state governments though, or that she is the due process judge over the justifiability of homicide within her body. At least we acknowledge it as homicide at a certain point.
I was born in to poverty, too. By immigrants, no less.
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The war on drugs is 100% due to the lucrative prison business.
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The only ‘right’ we are talking about is the right to live. Pregnant woman can smoke and drink and do anything else a legal adult can do. It’s not wise, it’s objectionable but they can do it. When you kill a fetus you take away everything it has and everything it would have been just like any other human.
Using brain development isn’t a very clear boundary since a human brain doesn’t fully develop until a person hits puberty. And the gestational period of development doesn’t change what a fetus is, which is a human life, without a fully developed brain. Which brings up an interesting question, “What gives you the right to prevent a human from developing it’s brain?”
I don’t mean “you” per se, in the question it’s a matter of phrasing.
I am not going to delve into it, but I find it interesting that you equate having a moral argument as a de facto religious argument. I am betting there are a lot of atheists who would disagree with you there.
For the record, I am making a 2 part argument to the effect of something like:
p1. It is wrong to kill human life when it’s no danger to any other human life.
p2. An unborn human is a human life
c1. Therefore, it is wrong to kill unborn human life, unless it’s a danger to another human life.
I just want to be clear again that I would like to reduce the amount of abortions and I feel pretty confident that the vast majority of pro-choice people would. Other than rape and the health of the mother both of which I think are extremely cruel to force women to go through.
I have also yet to see someone point out the negatives of sexual education and contraceptive use for society. Decreasing unwanted children and STI’s are both good things.
Yet some people are against them because apparently invisible sky man said so? Maybe I missed that growing up in the Bible. “Thou shalt not teacheth about sex nor weareth the Trojan! For if thou weareth the Trojan I will burn thee eternally.”
But I’m sure some passage exists somewhere where someone can do mental gymnastics to say they know exactly what a book meant about something even before that thing came into existence. Or they know a dude who knows that the book actually meant so they follow what that guy says the book means.
Not a person has argued against the benefits of what I’ve been saying but some are opposed to it because of what they think an old book says about them. A book that doesn’t even mention the exact things we are discussing at all. Items that didn’t even exist at the time of the book. Not being supported because some people think people from the book wouldn’t like it.
So our hold on pushing the education and contraceptives which will reduce abortion legal illegal, reduce STI’s, reduce unwanted pregnancies is a super old book that humans have argued since it’s existence about what it means.
This makes zero sense to me. Way less sense than Anthony Bourdain which I agree is surprising.
Police unions are very against ending the drug war. They spend a bunch of money lobbying to keep mj illegal. It again is good for them (more work to do). I agree with your statement mostly, but other groups are spending money to keep the drug war going too.
Another big group that spends lots of money to keep mj specifically illegal is the alcoholic beverage industry. Prescription drug companies also spend lots.
I think a secular democratic style government is the best one to maximize freedom while maintaining some rule of law. Well being is very subjective.
We have our own ideas as to what would maximize our own well being, but then you look at someone like Anthony Bourdain, a guy who presumably had it all, and had it all in spades. Apparently he couldn’t take it to the point of suicide. Blows my mind to this day. He couldn’t have a better job, he was rich and successful. He got to eat, drink and travel all over the world and get paid to do it… I can’t imagine a better well being (besides Hugh Hefner) to be had. And yet his life was apparently so bad, he couldn’t live another day… I don’t think I will ever understand that one.
We would have to define well being. I would propose that most people would agree that increases in the health of the public, education, nutrition, and decreases in homelessness, disease, and crime (that objectively hurts others) would be an increase to well being.
A brain dead human has trillions of live cells with human DNA which may be carrying out metabolic processes. I believe killing a few cell stage embryo is wrong but I don’t believe it has human rights necessarily. It HAS to have human rights to make it illegal or else it is a theological argument imo. And I think that if someone truly believes I’m morality they are a theist. My kind of morality requires free will and free will makes rationalism an incomplete description of reality.
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What does this mean? I disagree if you are saying only theists have a moral code? Not sure if you are saying that.
Rationalism doesn’t have to describe reality. It is a method of decision making and determining what is true or not. I am not sure what point you are trying to make.
Determining what is true or not is what I would call “describing reality”. What I would say is this. If someone does not believe in free will, then they can not accept that rationalism is capable of determining what is true or not. The reason is that without free will, all of our conclusions would be inevitable whether they are “true” or not. Once we accept that a conclusion was inevitable, adding the term “true” would be logically superfluous since there would be no test possible to distinguish between a true inevitable conclusion and a false inevitable conclusion. As a result, the term “true” is not a valid term in rational discourse if humans have no free will.
If humans do have truly free will-the ability to make two or more choices in a situation in a non-deterministic way, then no rationally developed model of reality can be complete since the ability to determine would preclude a non-deterministic choice. This requires that we always have to make decisions with some degree of extra-rational input or knowledge. I assert that using extra rational sources of knowledge is the simplest form of theism, though I am fine not calling it
theism because of the connotations, but rather calling them both “extra rationalism”.
If athiests have a moral code that can not be derived exclusively from rational thinking then they are essentially doing what theists do. If humans have free will then a moral choice will have to be based in part on extra rational reasoning. If humans don’t have free will, then there is no such thing as a rational choice since no test could distinguish between an inevitable choice that was rational and an inevitable choice that was not rational, so rational would be a superfluous term not allowed to be used in rational discourse.
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True, a brain dead person has trillions of living cells made of human DNA. But they are not autonomous independent human beings from said hypothetical brain dead person. They are the cell of the same human, not a different independent human.
I am not even touching your morality = theology because ‘rationalism’ statement. I will let you take that up with your fellow atheists. I am not discussing religion\ theism\ faith but I will discuss ethics and morality, independently from religion.
I’m not an atheist. I believe that killing a fetus is a sin. If the fetus is a moral human being then abortion is homicide. If the fetus is not a moral person then while killing it is a sin, it is not something for government to restrict.
So is a blatula consisting of 32 undifferentiated cells a human being but a brain dead person with 10 trillion active living cells not human being?
And there in lies the problem. Going back to the 20th century and looking at the USSR and their satellite nations, they had the basics and plus even a little more under communist-socialism. …Yet people risked life and limb to get fuck out of there as fast as they could. Literally everything. They didn’t build walls to keep people out, they built them to keep them in because they would have all left otherwise.
They had all the things you described and the misery index was off the charts.
So, you know I am 1st generation American with parents were one of the one’s who escaped by the skin of their teeth at the risk of at least a Siberian gulag if not death, if caught.
I get the sliding scales of socialism and what we already have as socialist policies, but you don’t want to much of this stuff. Every time you push your chips on to that table, you never get them back. I have seen what it can do, I have seen what it has done, housing, food, education, etc. the basics is enough to survive, not thrive. And those are very different things.
I must be confusing you with somebody else, I apologize…
Ironically, abortion went from being illegal in the Soviet Union to being the end result of 90% of conceptions after the fall of the soviet union and lightening of restrictions on religion. At one point it was estimated that half of Russian women had had an abortion. In Romania, abortion was illegal under socialist dictatorship and afterwards became the end result of 70% of pregnancies in a country where 85% of the population considers themselves to be Christian.