Mr gets six votes. That’s 2/3 right there.
(what I just said in my thread “reality is realistic”)
Life is LIFE… that is what it will forever come down to, and our psychopathic society is fragmenting people’s minds to no end. It is okay to bomb countries and okay to push abortion irrationally precisely goes hand by hand. This notion of necessary evil is caused by moral relativism, and what will engulf us all at some point.
The bottom line is that premise of the abortion debate is itself deeply flawed. Teaching the respect for Life starts in kindergarten, I am afraid. The educational system? What educational system?
Yes. Of course. You are absolutely right.
Yes, with abortion there are actual facts.
But then…
…when in fact does this new life become a “human being”?
…and, having determined that [if in fact it can be], is it in fact moral or immoral to destroy this life?
It would seem [to me] at this point philosophers are stumped.
Or “the facts” become the assumptions [political prejudices] that they accumulate “in their heads”.
!
How would you define abortion, especially under extreme measures?
In the United States most abortions are performed during the initial 14 weeks but some states allow abortions up to 24 weeks. If you go to an ultrasound at a clinic and they say you are too far along to receive an abortion you can ask if there is another location that will perform the procedure if you would still like one. In the United States abortions performed after 24 weeks are only performed due to health complications or else the procedure is considered intent to murder. Laws in this case vary from state to state.
newhealthguide.org/Latest-Ti … rtion.html
Could you, would you, consider this murder - look at that unborn child, the intent IS to kill, to end the life of, is it not?
What is the difference between abortion under these circumstances and going out and deliberately ending a life?
I’m just asking.
Murder is generally a legal term. As such the law can stipulate that abortion is murder at any point along the line from conception to actual birth.
And, by and large, we make things illegal because enough folks come together [politically] to proscribe a behavior that they deem to be wrong — immoral.
My problem of course is this: that I believe both sides make reasonable arguments here. They bring up points the arguments of the other side don’t make go away.
Thus we can’t live in a world where, if pregnant women are forced to give birth, the unborn are not killed. And we can’t live in a world where, if women have the right to choose abortion, the unborn are not killed.
Conflicting goods.
But, again, whether you call this murder or not would seem to revolve more around a legal description.
There is another argument
Forcing a woman to carry a fetus is essentially a prison term. The male has no affect on his life. One life is punished while the other gets off Scott free. Equality?? What happens to the infant being forced on to such a situation? Quality or quantity?
iambiguous
There is no black or white to me insofar as abortion is concerned. Many gray areas.
But what do YOU think?
Doing away with a three day old or week old embryo - is that akin to you as doing away with a 24 week old baby fetus?
Your baby now weighs up to 600g (1.3lb) and is starting to fill the space in your womb (uterus). From head (crown) to heel she now measures about 30cm (11.8in), which is about as long as an ear of corn. Her patterns of sleeping and waking are becoming more defined, although they may not happen when you’d like them to. You’ll probably find that when you’re trying to sleep, she’s alert and kicking.
Your baby’s brain is growing rapidly, and her facial muscles are getting a workout as she tests out different expressions by raising her eyebrows.
Although your baby still has a lot of growing to do before she’s ready to be born, she’s now considered “viable”. This means that if she were to be born this week, her lungs are developed enough so that she has a good chance of survival with extra care in a neonatal unit. Thankfully however, extreme prematurity is uncommon, so it’s unlikely you’ll be meeting your little one for a few months yet.
babycentre.co.uk/24-weeks-pr … z4XjmJmbwe
Note the underlined and italics.
Murder becomes much more than simply a “legal” term when we are touched by it.
True and depending on what that is, it can become a slippery slope - like the Salem Witch Trials. lol
That’s why it is not a black and white issue.
Yes, conflicting goods. But there might not be such conflicting goods if women took care.
I think that in many respects there is not even a hint of conflicting goods: child not wanted, it simply goes down the drain.
The conflicting goods enter in when that child for instance might be born with Down Syndrome or with some debilitating disease or where the woman is raped. A part of her might want the child born from a rape but another part rejects it. That’s conflicting goods to me.
Partly but certainly not entirely. I think that it would also evolve around common sense, compassion, intelligence, all of the circumstances surrounding that unborn child, including how far along the child is…thought out measured and balanced.
The legal system is not perfect.
Hi Krissy,
If people had the capacity to delay their own gratification and to come from a more compassionate outlook, perhaps the woman could carry the child to birth and then give him/her up for adoption. But I don’t suppose in this world too much.
There are many couples wanting children.
There may be more men than you think who would want that child but the woman is the queen of her body.
Is nine months such a long period of time? That infant might get a home with a wonderful couple who adopts him/her.
Arc your compassion is great and I would love a world with your attitude but, it is not so. If every female that could carry a healthy infant to full term rather than abort, there would be no qualified families left wanting to adopt a baby after a year. Close to or over 1 million fetuses are aborted every year.
numberofabortions.com
The numbers on this may not be actual but , given a leeway it still says that there are not enough loving families. The amount of babies would overwhelm the system. Children would be put into places that are paid to raise them. Millions of humans raised unloved and unwanted. Then you have to figure in economics , housing , education, food, water, ecology etc etc. Keep adding bodies every year into an overwhelmed system.
Would it not be better to prevent unwanted pregnancies first before banning abortions?? We must think about the future not just the present.
That’s pretty presumptuous. You have not a shred of evidence to back up a single word of what you are saying, and it just appears like leftist mental gymnastics to justify murder. How do you know that after the baby is carried to term that the mother won’t want it (many lawsuits to support such, including many cases of surrogacy)? The fact that the pregnancies are carried to term and we wouldn’t have the abortion mills would change the way we handle things, what you are saying is that nothing other than abortion/no abortion would change. That is a little shortsighted or disingenuous.
Prevent unwanted pregnancies? OK, how about we force people to take responsibility for themselves and their actions. It’s not about rights, it’s about responsibilities. Just because we have the technology stamp out the “unwanted” life, doesn’t mean it should be some kind of right, or legitimate option. Imagine if we applied that to every inconvenience. Just because we have prophylactics doesn’t mean there still isn’t a “risk”, and the failure of a prophylactic is still the result of someone making the decision to engage in the behaviour. This is like claiming giving everyone a basic minimum income will somehow make “poor” people suddenly more responsible.
How would you suggest we reduce unwanted pregnancies? I could imagine how popular among the SJW circle jerkers (and entitled millenials) an education program would be…Or did you just mean we need to create more and better technology to protect people from themselves and their actions?
Bottom line is close your fucking legs if you don’t want to get pregnant, and if an “accident” happens deal with the fact that you CHOSE to engage in the behaviour and all actions have consequences. You aren’t “forced” to carry for nine months, before not all that long ago in the grand scheme of things abortion wasn’t even a really viable option, how can it be an instrument of oppression now just because we have that ability?
If someone was to kill a pregnant woman, rip out the fetus and perform unspeakable acts upon it and pulled it limb from limb, and you think society wouldn’t look upon this as one of the most horrific things a person is capable of? How about you picture an abortion like that? The only difference is you can’t see it happening in an abortion.
Absolute depravity.
Equality? You can’t be serious. A man is literally incapable of carrying a child. Inequality is biologically built in (and you’re wrong if you think that only negatively affects women). You think that a good man wouldn’t take the baby upon themselves if that was an option? Especially in the case where the woman doesn’t want the baby? What level of equality are we talking here? Once the baby is born, it has the same “effect” on each parent, but still the woman is the only one that has the power to make decisions about the pre-born? Equality??? Can I claim inequality and force medical science to come up with a way for me to carry? Oh, and foot the bill to the taxpayer? And the fact that women are the only one’s able to carry, you don’t think that comes with some extra responsibility? It’s a valid reason for a woman to kill her baby because she couldn’t care for it or afford it, but if a woman tricks him into a pregnancy or lies about a father, or decides to carry against the man’s wishes not to have a child for the same reasons, but he is a deadbeat if he tries to ABORT being forced to pay the next 18 years of his life. 9 months or support and programs and gifts, yeah and some discomfort vs 18 years wage slavery, and destruction of one’s livelihood? What kind of equality are you talking about again?
No, they are in fact two different junctures on the road from conception to birth. But it is also true that in fact no 24 week old baby fetus will ever arrive at this stage if it is aborted in the first week of life. And in fact none of us participating in this exchange right now would be doing so if we had been aborted at any point from conception to birth.
But who can then tell us when any particular abortion must be deemed murder? Such that the one performing the abortion and the one receiving it are charged with a crime – first degree murder – and, if convicted, punished accordingly.
In other words, philosopher or not, who is able to tell us definitively when any particular abortion is essentially immoral in that it can be demonstrated in turn that all reasonable and virtuous men and women are obligated to agree.
Maybe, but folks on both sides of this political conflagration are “touched by it” from two very different [and conflicting] perspectives. In fact, both sides insist that it is they and they alone who have “common sense, compassion and intelligence” on their side.
And neither side is able to make the arguments of the other side just go away. If you permit abortion at any point – from conception to birth – it is not necessarily unreasonable to argue that a human being is being killed. If you force women to give birth it is not necessarily unreasonable to argue that women will always be at a distinct disadvantage politically. An unwanted pregnancy can crush any number of opportunities in life.
And then there is the question of rape. Obviously, the unborn baby cannot be held responsible.
But that’s more or less my point here. Every particular pregnancy is going to be situated out in a particular world, embedded in a particular context that can be construed [interpreted] from any number of conflicted vantage points.
Thus democracy and the rule of law seems to be the best of all possible worlds here. It’s just that with respect to abortion and all other conflicting goods, democracy or not, I am no less entangled in this:
If I am always of the opinion that 1] my own values are rooted in dasein and 2] that there are no objective values “I” can reach, then every time I make one particular moral/political leap, I am admitting that I might have gone in the other direction…or that I might just as well have gone in the other direction. Then “I” begins to fracture and fragment to the point there is nothing able to actually keep it all together. At least not with respect to choosing sides morally and politically.
Thus for me “conflicting goods” revolves more around the seeming futility of resolving these sort of conflicted value judgments. Both “in my head” and “out in the world”. I [and society] seem ever to be drawn and quartered here. Only the objectivists among us are able to “resolve” it all by insisting that they and only they have the right point of view.
But that, in my opinion, more or less revolves around this:
1] I am rational
2] I am rational because I have access to the ideal
3] I have access to the ideal because I grasp the one true nature of the objective world
4] I grasp the one true nature of the objective world because I am rational
Then the “ideal” is defined and defended by one or another rendition of God, political ideology, intellectual contraption and/or assessment of nature.
I do not care for Democrats or Republicans and especially despise their extremes.
I support abortion because I cannot stand seeing even one child abused. I believe in quality over quantity. As far as any program to prevent pregnancy well, education must start younger, free birth control to puberty aged kids given out in schools and paid incentives to have preventive surgery, perhaps have college paid for if the male or female prefer education over money, I am sure if people truly want to educate and prevent pregnancies there are other social ways.
Too few women truly love a child they are forced to keep. Orphanages are full now. Millions of more won’t help.
One thing I forbore to mention to my friend Arc because I think that she like me is sadly aware that forcing a female to carry could mean she won’t give a rat’s ass about the fetus. Thousands upon thousands to millions over a few years of females drinking booze , doing drugs, etc. not taking care of herself for the fetus. You really want that? You want women to go to back alleys for drugs to abort that only harm the fetus but not kill it or maybe a surgery that not only kills the fetus but, her as well? The only way to protect that many fetuses is to arrest the female and keep her imprisoned until birth. Your ignorance of humanity is showing. The father if he wants that child better take care of the female. If the father does not want kids , get a vasectomy, they are reversible now. Males are only responsible if the female names him and he does not contest it. You got your panties in a bunch over the word equal. Deadbeat Dad would not have come about if there were not more then a few deadbeats out there impregnating and running. So the dude might pay a few hundred a month ordered by the court. That is all he is bound to do. He does not have to even see his progeny only pay for them.
Yes , there are scum females that pop out babies for money, far too damn many. It sadly has become a career. Pop out a kid and the government pays you. Most of those baby paychecks are neglected or abused or both. After one child they should be required to get their tubes tied in order to get govt assistance.
I would rather see 10,000 dead fetuses then one abused child. Children should be loved and nurtured. Just living is not living.
This is a classical example of “self-defeating-catch-22-polarity-thinking” … the real problem is the commerce of death. End war and you will see people becoming a lot more responsible. Just a start of course but it needs to start somewhere. Blaming people’s actions while it is the society that teaches them in the first place that life equals peanuts, we else can we expect?
meanwhile pentagon seeks to invest $12 billion in AI weaponry, with the help of your tax money. Slaves who think they a free are the more dangerous of all
Krissy,
The fetus isn’t considered to be a child per se but do you not see the epitome of abuse within 10,000 fetuses being aborted? 10,000 fetuses!!!
To take away the right to life of all of those little beings is abusive to me. We sometimes cannot see the forest itself for the trees. I do realize though that there are those gray areas. You speak of quality of life. We cannot really know where a human being’s life’s journey will take him or her. We are capable of struggling, surviving, transforming and transcending our lives but we don’t give these little beings the opportunity to have that. We want to protect them by destroying them. Where is the logic in that?
We like to play god. We are the masters of our fate, the puppeteers, the judges, jury and executioners.
We don’t believe that their lives have validity at that time because they are not out in the world as we are though as we are already out in the world, so are they. We take away their voice before they have even had a chance to evolve one.
It’s such a terrible human waste. We have no idea of the great potential we may be destroying.
Yes. Is this what abortion does?
But you are basing the right to destroy all of these human beings (fetuses) on the assumption that they might not be, would NOT be loved and nurtured, Krissy.
It’s not even logical to put the cart before the horse in this regard, Krissy.
I understand what you’re saying, what you’re reasoning is but I wonder - there might be some children who being born who are or were abused and neglected who might wish that they had honestly never been born but I wonder just how many of those being brought into that kind of a world would still wish to have been born and lived and not aborted.
Is that a lot?
In 2013 in the USA, there were 664,435 abortions.
americanspcc.org/child-abuse-statistics/
And these are only the ones known about, brought to public knowledge. Some abuses are so hideous that you would get ill and then vengeful.
Arc, before we bring more and more into this world by a law that forces full term. We need to fix the system and the hearts. A fetus never has to look into the eyes of a person it trusts while that person does horrible things to it. Fix the system before bringing millions more into it.
Doesn’t that blow your mind? It says a lot about humanity doesn’t it?
As casual as flushing a toilet to us.
I was just going to put some pictures of little aborted beings on here but I didn’t have the heart too.
And would it even matter?
We live in a society which values convenience and self-gratification. Foresight, responsibility and accountability are secondary. That’s not going to change in the near future.
There are hints of changes