Abortions - Why? [W:280, 411, 1768]

[OKgrannie]

So not only is it wrong, but it's been around too long?

That's HORRIBLE!

Criminalize Abortion NOW!

Abortion has been criminalized before too. It didn't work then and it won't work now.

 

[FutureIncoming]

Actually what I said in the recent past is that I believe it is a person. The reason I believe it is a person is because it was conceived by two other persons and it contains everything it needs to be a person (chromosomes, DNA, etc). But I never said I had objective proof.

INDEED YOU HAVE SAID SUCH THINGS BEFORE. Consistency is good, except when it is wrongly applied. Here I'm going to ask you to more-precisely explain the phrase "everything it needs to be a person", because none of the things you parenthetically mentioned ("chromosomes, DNA, etc") would keep the average tomato plant or dandelion from qualifying as a person.

I hope you aren't going to be as stupidly prejudiced as JayDubya, by specifying the "human-ness" of those chromosomes, DNA, etc. In #1057 I asked you about the possibility of non-human persons, such a dolphins (please reply to that). If any non-human persons exist, then the human-ness of DNA is meaningless as a defining characteristic of persons.

In actual Scientific Fact, what a zygote has is "every instruction it needs, regarding how to grow to become a person". But it is not a person until those instructions are executed, and it grows enough.

 

[FutureIncoming]

"Pregnancy is a blessing" Religiously based emotional BS.

Not quite. The claim is certainly Religion-based, and very popular with preachers for millennia. And they had a good reason (not BS) for that claim to be popular. See #1066 for details, heh!
http://www.debatepolitics.com/abortion/130198-abortions-why-w-280-411-a-3.html#post1060748568

 

[FutureIncoming]

I think you already know that I have a moral obligation to try and get abortion criminalized, ...

I KNOW YOU MISTAKENLY THINK SO. Time to re-post some stuff from #707:

Are you aware that morals are arbitrary? If one group claims eating pork is immoral, and another says it is OK, who is right? And exactly why should one group be more right about that than the other? As far back as the ancient Greek historian Herodotus, it was known that the real ruler of any culture is CUSTOM ("Custom is King" goes the quotation).

Ethics, however, stands a chance of not being rather less than purely arbitrary. That's because an ethical system starts with some single specific premise, and derives the rest as logical consequences of that premise. Obviously, different sets of ethics can arise from different premises. A classic example involves the Vikings, who thought it was quite OK to rape and murder and pillage other groups, but no Viking could get away with doing that inside the Viking group. So, "our group is inherently superior", or something like that, must have been part of the basis of Viking ethics.

On the other hand, it should be obvious that the more fundamental a premise is chosen, the more likely it is to acceptable to the widest possible collection of groups. What do you think of this as a premise for a system of ethics: "People should get along with each other."? From that it logically follows that rape and murder and pillaging need to be forbidden, everywhere. It can even work between human persons and extraterrestrial nonhuman alien persons. And other things can be derived, also....

In ancient Rome there was a guy named Crassus who started the world's first fire department. He and his team would go as fast as they could to reach a burning building, and then, before fighting the fire, Crassus would negotiate a price with the owner of the building. He became the richest man in Rome. And the word "crass" entered the language as another result. Today we would consider such behavior to be quite unethical.

That ethical system can work between persons and mere animals. For example, a horse is willing to work for the food and shelter we provide; the relationship can be ethical "getting along with each other", even though the horse is just an animal. However, it can't work between persons and all animals. If you Google for "vampire bats are beneficial" you won't find any significant matches for that phrase. (You can find benefits associated with mosquitoes!)

Note that abortion can remain ethical so long as there is no evidence for considering the unborn to be persons --the specified foundation for this ethical system is about persons, generically, getting along with each other. And regarding "getting along" with an animal in this case, the unborn human is hardly beneficial, committing assault for nine months.

Your "moral obligation" is based on unproved claims made by ignorant preachers, thousands of years ago --and claims that were made specifically for their own benefit (see #1066). It is difficult to imagine greater arbitrariness than that!

 

[FutureIncoming]

Show how murder is objectively wrong? Sounds like a trick, but I'll bite just to see where this goes. Murder is wrong because killing is wrong. Duh!

"FUN WITH PHILOSOPHY" TIME! First, killing is not generically wrong, since very few living organisms, including you, RamFel, can survive without killing other living organisms. Your answer is therefore fundamentally flawed.

Let us now consider a Religious Perspective or three. Souls are immortal, by definition, right? Nothing physical can harm them at all, probably including jumping into a black hole for fun. So, with that as a fundamental point, what do souls need human (or alien) bodies for? The standard claim is that a soul is associated with a physical body for a lifetime, after which the soul is Judged for the manner in which it interacted with others.

It sounds like a Game, with winners and losers. Now, some Religious Philosophies claim that each soul gets to play the Game only once, and other Religious Philosophies claim that any soul can play the Game (reincarnate) many times. As you know, there is not a lot of Scientific Evidence in support of various Religious Philosophies, but here are two fairly interesting/relevant items:
Incorrupt Bodies
Twenty Cases Suggestive of Reincarnation - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

The Thing About Games In General Is That Rules Are Arbitrary, And Differ From Game To Game. That story about Adam and Eve eating the Fruit Of Knowledge Of Good And Evil is, to my mind, telling us that we have (whether literally acquired or not) the ability to declare, arbitrarily, various things to be Good, and other things to be Evil. And, simply because different people are different from each other, different people tend to arbitrarily choose different things to declare are Good or Evil. It is the resulting arguments that actually constituted the "Fall of Man", an inability to regain the innocence associated with "living in the Garden of Eden".

So, is murder, the killing of a person, wrong? Someone who commits it may disagree with someone who doesn't; they are simply playing the Game by different rules!

Of course, we have, over the millennia, learned the hard way that it is pretty important for people to play any particular Game with just one set of rules. Here's an excellent example: In the classic board-game "Monopoly", many people play according to a Rule that puts certain money into the middle of the board, and that money can be collected by whoever lands on the "Free Parking" square. This Rule Is Not In The Official Written Game Rules! It is a variant Rule that is simply very popular. So, the point here is, regardless of what Rules some Game is played by, as long as the players agree to them in advance, the Game will generally be considered "fair".

In the Game of human interactions, murder is generally frowned-upon, because it can remove players from the Game unwillingly, in a manner far outside normal expectations. And, obviously, if murder was widely allowed, the Game could end pretty quickly in a "last man standing" way, with just one surviving human, which is not very useful for letting future generations play the Game!

So, in essence, murder is frowned-upon for purely pragmatic reasons, not because it is inherently "wrong".

How does the preceding tie to the Overall Abortion Debate? Well, it all depends on whether or not unborn humans have souls, and different Religious Philosophies have different opinions on the matter. If the unborn have souls, then abortion is murder, and if they don't, then abortion is not murder. Science as yet has no widely-acceptable data on this topic; Science hasn't even been able to prove that fully adult humans have souls, much less the unborn!

However, based on the data presented earlier, some simple Logic may apply. The evidence for reincarnation suggests that souls --which by definition are immortal-- can simply and easily afford to wait to reincarnate into human bodies that don't get aborted. There may be a long waiting list, of souls wanting to claim bodies for reincarnation. But since souls are immortal, waiting won't hurt them one bit.

 

[minnie616]

Yep, Ramfel
Abortion has been around at least since 1550 BCE.
I guess the Egyptian Ebers Papyrus thought abortion would be a great way to control the world's populaton.
See what a great job abortion has done keeping our population down.

 

[FutureIncoming]

d. If I don't want to EVER give birth it might be logical to tie my tubes than to endlessly worry about being pregnant and getting abortions.

Don't ASSume I haven't tried. Matter of fact, I have tried to have my tubes tied and was denied because I don't have children.

One of my acquaintances is a woman who didn't believe in abortion and had 6 children before she was 21, and was still denied a tubal ligation, because she was under 21, despite being married.

Here's an alternative to tubal ligation that you might look into:
07th week of 2010 patent applcation highlights part 6
Basically, the idea is to install valves in the Fallopian Tubes....

 

[FutureIncoming]

Interesting. I totally agree with the article that people need to make use of BC. I mean, it is 2012!!! Why get pregnant if you don't want to and don't have to? Irresponsibility?

Most forms of birth control are not 100% effective. Abortion then qualifies as a "backup plan", for those who don't want to be pregnant.

It also made me think of another issue. What about the father? Where do his rights to his unborn child begin and end? What if the mother wants to abort but the father doesn't, or vice versa? I know that it's the woman's body, but the man is still the father of the child. Just another thing to think about I guess.

The man's contribution is trivial. See Item #40, here:
http://www.debatepolitics.com/blogs...-anti-abortion-arguments-refuted-part-11.html

 

[FutureIncoming]

I never thought that you were the eugenics type. I think you're the Malthusian Catastrophe type.

Somewhat, but I don't go overboard about it, unlike what you might be thinking. Here's something from #1064:

Also, I have specifically stated more than once that abortion is a tool that can help stave off a Malthusian Catastrophe. Only if abortion is misused can it actually prevent such a thing from happening. And I'm against misusing any tool. My beef with abortion opponents is simply that they act like they want a Malthusian Catastrophe to happen as soon as possible. In what way is such an action a sign that intelligent beings inhabit this planet? WELL???

 

[FutureIncoming]

Absurdity. They are killing a third party, an innocent human being. This is regardless of how the conception occurred - your offspring was the result of that coupling, not party to it.

FALSE, THRICE. Here I'm not going to focus on the first two lies, regarding "innocent", and "being"; I'm going to focus on the third lie. Because, despite your claims, sex does not cause pregnancy.

If the claim was true, then pregnant women who had sex would always become pregnant again (multiple womb-occupants of significantly different conception times). If the claim was true, women would always become pregnant when having sex after menopause. If the claim was true, it would be impossible to have sex without pregnancy happening. Those are only some of the logical consequences of the statement "sex causes pregnancy".

Some more consequences would include these: "Artificial insemination could never work to cause pregnancy." "There would be absolutely no need for fertility clinics to exist." "In-vitro fertilization would always fail to yield a zygote." In other words, the fact is, "Sex is neither necessary nor sufficient, to cause pregnancy."

The only thing that sex does is provide an opportunity for a sperm to encounter an ovum. Sex does not force them to merge:
The Aggressive Egg | Sex & Reproduction | DISCOVER Magazine
The egg is an active participant in the fertilization process. It is quite possible that the reason some couples seek help from a fertility clinic is that the woman's eggs are actively refusing to accept any of the man's sperm as suitable. It means that fertilization is the result of the actions of independent organisms, sperm and egg, not the male and female sex-participants

Next, the result of fertilization is a zygote, another independently-alive organism. It can't stay independent for long, however, because the ovum contained a limited supply of food. So the organism has to crack out of the "egg shell"
WonderQuest: What triggers twinning?
--and seek more nutrients elsewhere. It is this "blastocyst" stage that makes an effort to implant into a womb, to get those nutrients. There is a large chance that it will fail
Feature-The Facts of Life
--the sex act does not force the blastocyst to implant; its actions are independent of the actions of sex-participants.

Pregnancy only begins with the assault of blastocyst-implantation; that is the cause of pregnancy. Not sex. So stop lying, please.

 

[FutureIncoming]

This might have been alright brought up. If abortion is the same thing as killing a human being, ...

IF. Since the "if" is false, the rest of what you wrote does not apply.

Briefly, consider the phrase "fish being", which is never used in casual conversation the way "human being" is used. Meanwhile, casual conversations do sometimes include phrases such as "intelligent being" or "extraterrestrial being" or "alien being". It is clear that the word "being", as used in casual conversations, is synonymous with "person" --and a fish is not a person. Well, neither is an unborn human; when was the last time you encountered the phrase "fetus being" in casual conversation? Basically, applying the phrase "human being" to unborn humans is nothing more than worthless anti-abortion propaganda, a mis-use of the language in an attempt to equate the unborn with persons.

 

[JayDubya]

Because, despite your claims, sex does not cause pregnancy.

:screwy





A-yup.

If the claim was true, it would be impossible to have sex without pregnancy happening

Um. No. That does not logically follow at all, anymore than your mischaracterization of a right to life as being guaranteed immortality. Your thinking is alien and bizarre.

 

[FutureIncoming]

... don't believe the totally and utterly ridiculous:

#1034, by FutureIncoming
Unborn human animal organisms are certainly real, and if implanted into wombs are certainly committing real assault.

#1037, by FutureIncoming
It is not the same thing as a "baby" until it is able to survive without committing assault.

YOUR MERE CLAIMS OF RIDICULOUSNESS ARE WORTHLESS WITHOUT EVIDENCE. Please provide the supporting evidence. And, I'm still waiting for you to refute --with evidence!-- #1058.

 

[FutureIncoming]

Regarding the claim "sex causes pregnancy":

If the claim was true, it would be impossible to have sex without pregnancy happening.

Um. No. That does not logically follow at all ...

HAW! HAW!! HAW!!! The statement "sex causes pregnancy" is what it is, without any "ifs", "and", "buts" or other qualifications. Once again you prove you are the one who doesn't know what words mean.

 

[nota bene]

One of my acquaintances is a woman who didn't believe in abortion and had 6 children before she was 21, and was still denied a tubal ligation, because she was under 21, despite being married.

Your example here is atypical in the extreme. Your acquaintance, unless she had three sets of twins, two sets of triplets, or some other two-fer special, began reproducing at what--age 13 or 14 and remained continually pregnant for six or seven years? And in all this time didn't figure out where babies come from or how to successfully use birth control?

Bigger problems here than needing a tubal ligation.

 

[FutureIncoming]

Here is a response:
Unstringing the Violinist: Dismantling a Common Argument for Abortion - Christianity.com

Are there important differences between pregnancy and kidnapping? Yes, many.

First, the violinist is artificially attached to the woman. A mother's unborn baby, however, is not surgically connected, nor was it ever "attached" to her. Instead, the baby is being produced by the mother's own body by the natural process of reproduction.

Abortion opponents are fond of mis-using the word "baby". See #1037 for why they should be ashamed of doing that.

Next, see #1185. Nothing can change the fact that an unborn human is an organism different from other human organisms, and that it has the ability to act independently, at least as far as womb-implantation is concerned. Which act makes it begin being guilty of assault, as detailed most recently in #1058.

A child is not an invader, though, a parasite living off his mother. A mother's womb is the baby's natural environment. Eileen McDonagh wants us to believe that the child growing inside of a woman is trespassing. One trespasses when he's not in his rightful place, but a baby developing in the womb belongs there.

BAD DATA, since that argument ignores the fact that equally-natural miscarriages do occur. Some of them happen so soon after implantation that they are called "late periods" instead of "miscarriages". Also, there is something known as "Rh-factor rejection", an incompatibility between the mother's immune system and the unborn human, that almost always causes a miscarriage, unless modern medical technology is employed to intervene. Such a thing would never happen if that argument was completely valid.
Rh Factor : American Pregnancy Association

Also, there exists a completely different mechanism by which a mother's body might kill an unborn human, "fetal resorption". This phenomenon is fairly common in kangaroos; when the environment is poor in food, a pregnant kangaroo will literally suck out the life --and body-- of its womb-inhabitant, until nothing remains. Other mammals can accomplish fetal resorption as well, including humans (rarely).
http://www.ucv.ve/fileadmin/user_up...al/Vitamins_in_Animal_and_Human_Nutrition.pdf

The existence of fetal resorption means one thing that drives at the heart of a significant number of anti-abortion arguments: It is perfectly natural for the unborn to be killed if conditions aren't adequate for supporting it. And growing humans happen to need more support --especially after birth-- than any other species, by a wide margin. Who is best situated to determine whether or not a particular unborn human can be adequately supported? Certainly not the average abortion opponent!

Thompson ignores a second important distinction. In the violinist illustration, the woman might be justified withholding life-giving treatment from the musician under these circumstances. Abortion, though, is not merely withholding treatment. It is actively taking another human being's life through poisoning or dismemberment. A more accurate parallel with abortion would be to crush the violinist or cut him into pieces before unplugging him.

THERE IS MORE THAN ONE WAY TO DO AN ABORTION. Consider that medical technology includes slim fiber-optic "snakes" that can be inserted into the body to see Up Close and Personal what's going on in various places (like what does a heart valve look like from inside the bloodstream). Imagine such a snake inserted through the cervix to examine a fetus. Fiber optics work both ways, so you could send a laser beam through the snake to cut the umbilical cord. Nobody worries about how painful is, cutting the cord after birth...and this will cause the fetal brain to quickly shut down, and then die after about 6 minutes, from lack of oxygen. A miscarriage can be expected to eventually Naturally follow, to expel the dead fetus, so no other cutting is required.

Third, the violinist illustration is not parallel to pregnancy because it equates a stranger/stranger relationship with a mother/child relationship. This is a key point and brings into focus the most dangerous presumption of the violinist illustration, also echoed in McDonagh's thesis. Both presume it is unreasonable to expect a mother to have any obligations towards her own child.

"CHILD" IS ALSO BEING MIS-USED HERE. See #1037. Also, see the third assault specified in #1058. It actually is unreasonable to expect the woman to have an obligation toward the unborn, else Nature would not have evolved this particular addictive-drug-injection assault!

 

[FutureIncoming]

... because I believe it [an unborn human is a person], I will say it. Until someone comes out with scientific evidence that it is not. And I don't think that will ever happen.

DONE. There is lots of evidence that many many mere animals greatly exceed newborn humans in multiple mental capabilities. Therefore, logically, if you want to insist that newborn humans are persons, you should also insist that those mere animals qualify as persons, too. Why isn't that done? Two reasons:

1. It is known that most newborn humans can grow to exceed the mental capabilities of mere animals. Until they do, though, those humans are also, in Measurable Scientific Fact, mere animals. Which logically means that all unborn humans, having even fewer capabilities, qualify as mere animals also.

2. The Law granted person status to newborn humans in ignorance of the Scientific Facts. And, since humans are naturally prejudiced about humans, that's why mere animals were excluded from being granted personhood.

You see, I know why you say you believe that it is not a person.

OBVIOUSLY NOT. Because you keep denying the Scientific Facts, as described above.

Because if it were generally accepted by all that it was a person, you would have a much harder time keeping abortion legal.

IRRELEVANT. The only thing we need be concerned about is the fact that many abortion opponents refuse to accept facts, and spout lies. You even lie about God (when it is claimed that Almighty God is somehow forced to create a soul just because a human egg got fertilized, or is about-to-be fertilized).

...the pro-choice crowd has ... Excuses such as:

It's not alive.
It's just a mass of cells.
It's a nonviable tissue mass.
It's not human.
It's not a person.
It's too small.
It doesn't feel pain.
It doesn't have a brain.
It can't think.
It's not aware of itself.
It's an invader.
It assaults the mother.
It's stealing nutrition from the mother.

I DISAGREE WITH SOME OF THOSE EXCUSES. Because they are not facts (first and fourth), or not actually relevant (second, third, and sixth through tenth). But the rest are indeed relevant facts. Which means they are not actually "excuses". It is your denial-of-facts that leads you to claim without evidence that they are merely excuses.

 

[nota bene]

If you approached any ten random folks on the street, I wonder what they would answer if asked what they call what's growing inside a pregnant woman's womb.

I wonder what the pregnant lady would say. "Oh, my darling little ZEF/potential human being/product of conception/potential person is due at the end of October"?

 

[FutureIncoming]

Regarding having six kids and still being denied a tubal ligation:

Your example here is atypical in the extreme.

MAYBE. The overall situation was complicated by factors that I need not detail. Besides, keep in mind that there actually are some women who are quite happy to pass their genes on, if someone else would pay for it:
Nadya Suleman - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

 

[nota bene]

Regarding having six kids and still being denied a tubal ligation: MAYBE. The overall situation was complicated by factors that I need not detail. Besides, keep in mind that there actually are some women who are quite happy to pass their genes on, if someone else would pay for it:
Nadya Suleman - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Yes, "Octomom" is the ultimate atypical example. As for having six kids by age 21, "complicating" details have nothing at all to do with the fact that this is atypical in the extreme.

 

[FutureIncoming]

If you approached any ten random folks on the street, I wonder what they would answer if asked what they call what's growing inside a pregnant woman's womb.

I wonder what the pregnant lady would say. "Oh, my darling little ZEF/potential human being/product of conception/potential person is due at the end of October"?

I'm quite aware that there is a lot of ignorance out there, which continues to cause emotional problems whenever a miscarriage happens. Perhaps more people should be reminded of this:
http://www.scribd.com/doc/63887899/Childhood-in-World-History

... some aspects of modern Western childhood (indeed, modern childhood in any advanced industrial society) seem so normal and significant that it is difficult to empathize with key features of the past. Who would go back to a situation when a third or more of all children died before age two, in which some parents did not even bother naming children before that time because the kids were so likely to die?

In other words, most people didn't put a lot of emotional investment into unborn humans the way they do today. I strongly suspect that much of the sentiment against abortion is directly related to that erroneous modern trend. And the reason it is erroneous is because miscarriages still happen in about 1/6 or 1/7 of all known pregnancies, as has been true for millennia. There is no need to cause emotional suffering by encouraging unnecessary emotional investment!

Regarding the thing to say, when asked the Question you posed at the start of your post, how about "baby under construction, with Murphy's Law applicable"? That is accurate, because it is different from "baby, assumed to have 100% chance of being born normally". And it helps to prevent unwarranted emotional investment.

 

[ChrisL]

I'm quite aware that there is a lot of ignorance out there, which continues to cause emotional problems whenever a miscarriage happens. Perhaps more people should be reminded of this:
http://www.scribd.com/doc/63887899/Childhood-in-World-History
In other words, most people didn't put a lot of emotional investment into unborn humans the way they do today. I strongly suspect that much of the sentiment against abortion is directly related to that erroneous modern trend. And the reason it is erroneous is because miscarriages still happen in about 1/6 or 1/7 of all known pregnancies, as has been true for millennia. There is no need to cause emotional suffering by encouraging unnecessary emotional investment!

Regarding the thing to say, when asked the Question you posed at the start of your post, how about "baby under construction, with Murphy's Law applicable"? That is accurate, because it is different from "baby, assumed to have 100% chance of being born normally". And it helps to prevent unwarranted emotional investment.

LOL! Ummmm, yeah, I don't think so. That's ridiculous. You MUST be joking! And it is only YOUR opinion that a woman's unborn child should be an "unwarranted" emotional investment. I suppose that would depend on the woman and if she wishes to have the child or not. Also, did you know that women actually bond with their babies while they are still in the womb. As a matter of fact, a lot of women start bonding as soon as they feel the first little flutter of life and will sing to them and speak to them. They also say that the baby CAN hear the sound of it's mother's voice. Quite an amazing and beautiful bond between mother and child, whether born or unborn.

When Can a Baby Hear in the Womb? | ModernMom.com

 

[Scrabaholic]

So not only is it wrong, but it's been around too long?

That's HORRIBLE!

Criminalize Abortion NOW!

It's been around as long as women have been getting pregnant and will be around as long women continue to. Criminalising it would not stop it or even slow it down by any significant measure. Besides there being the option of going to another country to get one, there would be illegal abortions, and also with the ease of getting information out in today's world, women could find out how to ingest herbs to induce a miscarriage. If it becomes illegal in the states (which I doubt it will), I would be happy to post info on how to get one on my website, and donate money and help out in any way I could to facilitate women getting here to get a surgical abortion if that was their choice.

 

[Scrabaholic]

One of my acquaintances is a woman who didn't believe in abortion and had 6 children before she was 21, and was still denied a tubal ligation, because she was under 21, despite being married.

Here's an alternative to tubal ligation that you might look into:
07th week of 2010 patent applcation highlights part 6
Basically, the idea is to install valves in the Fallopian Tubes....

Fortunately, I'm past needing it now.

 

[Scrabaholic]

If you approached any ten random folks on the street, I wonder what they would answer if asked what they call what's growing inside a pregnant woman's womb.

I wonder what the pregnant lady would say. "Oh, my darling little ZEF/potential human being/product of conception/potential person is due at the end of October"?

When I refer to a tissue, I call it kleenex, even though I do not use that brand.

ETA Part of the city of Hamilton, Ontario is on top of an escarpment, part below it. Citizens of Hamilton refer to it as 'the mountain' even though it is not a mountain, it is an escarpment.