Is Abortion a Moral Right?

[JayDubya]

Don't rattle Jay with the facts. Facts often disturb him.

Non-sequitur garbage assertions may or may not be factual; it does not make them any more or less irrelevant.

And your mindless personal attack is noted.

 

[Removable Mind]

Unless you are posting as a fraudulent persona, by your words I am correct on all statements. :shrug:

Whatever makes you feel good with yourself, Jay....

 

[JayDubya]

Whatever makes you feel good with yourself, Jay....

Irrelevant. You have said what you said, which means you are what you are, philosophically. By your words, you are a Malthusian environmentalist with a negative view towards humanity as a whole, you are a leftist with a negative view of the free market, you support big government authoritarianism, and you are a proponent of elective abortion with a specifically dim view on men and want women to have special privileges unique to them.

:shrug:

It's not like any of those aspects are debatable. I can only assume from context you intended to shock others with your needless sexist authoritarian misanthropic forced vasectomy scheme...

... but there is nothing shocking about you making such a horrific proposal.

 

[Removable Mind]

Irrelevant. You have said what you said, which means you are what you are, philosophically, you are a Malthusian environmentalist with a negative view towards humanity as a whole, you are a leftist with a negative view of the free market, you support big government authoritarianism, and you are a proponent of elective abortion with a specifically dim view on men and want women to have special privileges unique to them.

:shrug:

It's not like any of those aspects are debatable. I can only assume from context you intended to shock others with your needless sexist authoritarian misanthropic forced vasectomy scheme...

... but there is nothing shocking about you making such a horrific proposal.

As I said, whatever makes you feel good, Jay.

 

[JayDubya]

As I said, whatever makes you feel good, Jay.

I am sooo sorry I did not please you with the outrage you were clearly fishing for.

 

[Scrabaholic]

Isn't the fetus inside a larger structure - the female body?

What is inside a fertilized chicken egg is an embryo, not a chicken. Your opponent is wrong.

 

[matchlight]

The inherent police power of the states is not limitless and it is solely intended for the wellbeing of the people of the state.

The police power of states is limited only by the Fourteenth Amendment, and it is up to the people of each state to say what its police power is intended for. Neither you nor anyone else gets to tell the people of any other state what does and does not advance their well-being.

The Supreme Court itself no longer supports the Roe Court's assertion that there is a fundamental right to abortion located in the Due Process Clause of that amendment. And as Justice Scalia correctly noted in his dissenting opinion in Lawrence v. Texas,

Our opinions applying the doctrine known as "substantive due process" hold that the Due Process Clause prohibits States from infringing fundamental liberty interests, unless the infringement is narrowly tailored to serve a compelling state interest. We have held repeatedly, in cases the Court today does not overrule, that only fundamental rights qualify for this so-called "heightened scrutiny" protection . . . All other liberty interests may be abridged or abrogated pursuant to a validly enacted state law if that law is rationally related to a legitimate state interest. (internal citations omitted)

In as much as "government" has no specific power or reason to ban abortion and all powers and and rights not delegated to "government" are retained by the people, then is is not unreasonable to say that it is a right.

Not so. You are conflating the powers of the federal government with those of the states. The United States has no inherent powers, but only those limited, specified powers the states and their people have seen fit to grant it in the Constitution. States, in contrast, have general, inherent powers as sovereigns, and therefore do not need to be granted any specific power by anyone to ban abortion. Many of them exercised their inherent power to do just that during the two centuries before Roe v. Wade. You are also misstating the Tenth Amendment. It says that all powers the Constitution neither delegates to the federal government nor prohibits to the states are reserved to the states respectively, or to the people.

 

[Removable Mind]

The police power of states is limited only by the Fourteenth Amendment, and it is up to the people of each state to say what its police power is intended for. Neither you nor anyone else gets to tell the people of any other state what does and does not advance their well-being.

The Supreme Court itself no longer supports the Roe Court's assertion that there is a fundamental right to abortion located in the Due Process Clause of that amendment. And as Justice Scalia correctly noted in his dissenting opinion in Lawrence v. Texas,

Our opinions applying the doctrine known as "substantive due process" hold that the Due Process Clause prohibits States from infringing fundamental liberty interests, unless the infringement is narrowly tailored to serve a compelling state interest. We have held repeatedly, in cases the Court today does not overrule, that only fundamental rights qualify for this so-called "heightened scrutiny" protection . . . All other liberty interests may be abridged or abrogated pursuant to a validly enacted state law if that law is rationally related to a legitimate state interest. (internal citations omitted)



Not so. You are conflating the powers of the federal government with those of the states. The United States has no inherent powers, but only those limited, specified powers the states and their people have seen fit to grant it in the Constitution. States, in contrast, have general, inherent powers as sovereigns, and therefore do not need to be granted any specific power by anyone to ban abortion. Many of them exercised their inherent power to do just that during the two centuries before Roe v. Wade. You are also misstating the Tenth Amendment. It says that all powers the Constitution neither delegates to the federal government nor prohibits to the states are reserved to the states respectively, or to the people.

Too bad for you that Scalia wasn't the only Justice serving on the S.C. A one man show, so-to-speak. There are so many folks, past and present who disagree with Scalia and you, but....

Spit it out, tell us what you really and truly would like to see happen, but then head straight to Your reason your so adverse to abortion.


Cutting to the chase.....

You'd love for there to be a very specific Amendment created that forces women to give birth should the government gain knowledge of a conception. - and put any and all medical providers in prison who are connected to any discovered procedures related to abortion.

Then make damn sure attorneys don't head straight to the 13th Amendment. Involuntary Servitude seems to fit even though it hasn't been tested in the S.C.

 

[matchlight]

Too bad for you that Scalia wasn't the only Justice serving on the S.C. A one man show, so-to-speak. There are so many folks, past and present who disagree with Scalia and you, but....

What anyone thinks of Justice Scalia is irrelevant. I quoted from that opinion not because of its author, but rather because it is a concise and completely accurate statement of the constitutional law on the issue for which I offered it as authority. Anyone who had bothered to go to the case and read the citations I omitted, for the sake of space, would have seen they make very clear that what Justice Scalia wrote is supported by a long series of Supreme Court decisions. The statement of the law I quoted would have been no less accurate if any other person had written it.

Spit it out, tell us what you really and truly would like to see happen, but then head straight to Your reason your so adverse to abortion.

The urge to personalize the issue being debated is a telltale sign of a weak debater. You have no way of knowing what my personal views on abortion are, and in any case they are irrelevant. People in your circle may be in the habit of misusing the Constitution to support whatever outcomes they favor for personal reasons, but they should not assume that everyone else holds himself to such a low standard.

On this subject, for example, more than a few legal scholars have written articles during the four decades since Roe in which they harshly attacked the decision on constitutional grounds, despite the fact they strongly supported abortion. Even Justice Ginsburg has had unkind things to say about Roe.

Cutting to the chase.....You'd love for there to be a very specific Amendment created that forces women to give birth should the government gain knowledge of a conception. - and put any and all medical providers in prison who are connected to any discovered procedures related to abortion.

Apparently you imagine you are clairvoyant. If so, your powers leave much to be desired, because you are as far off the mark with this silliness as with the rest of your remarks. I had never even given a thought to any such thing, before reading your sophomoric pap forced me to imagine it. And when I did, the images were at least good for a chuckle.

Then make damn sure attorneys don't head straight to the 13th Amendment. Involuntary Servitude seems to fit even though it hasn't been tested in the S.C.

You may entertain the fanciful notion that the Thirteenth Amendment is well suited for use in abortion cases, but I doubt many people who know much more about constitutional law than you do would agree. Not many cases in which parties based their claims on the Thirteenth Amendment have reached the Supreme Court, and those claims have not fared too well. In 1916, an involuntary servitude argument went nowhere fast in Butler v. Perry. The shining moment came in Jones v. Alfred Mayer in 1968, where the Court held that a private person's discrimination in the sale of housing unconstitutionally imposed a "badge of slavery" on the would-be black buyer. In 1981, however, another "badge of slavery" argument flopped in Memphis v. Greene.

 

[Phys251]

What? I stand for life including those who do not have a voice.

Yes woman currently have the power to decide who gets to live and who must die.

Hope the boom boom sexual gratification was worth making such a choice.

How shallow, how pathetic we have become when speaking about a life.

Then I assume you are a pro bono attorney? Or do you believe that you get to pick and choose which "voiceless people" deserve a voice?

 

[DashingAmerican]

91 percent of all abortions in the US take place during the first trimester ( 12 ) weeks.

Most of the remaining are for medical reasons.

With education and better pregnancy tests kits most unwanted pregnancies are caught earlier than a generation ago.

Thankfully artifical birth control has become more effective and 65 percent of US women of child bearing years use artifical birth control consistently. That's not including women who cannot become pregnant due to medical conditions or medical procedures.

The fewer unwanted pregnancies that happen, the fewer elective abortions that occur.

Women do not electively abort wanted pregnancies.

I agree that nobody aborts a wanted pregnancy, but are you saying that nobody uses abortion strictly as birth control?

 

[DashingAmerican]

GOOD. Unless you have been only reading/listening to stuff on just one side of the Overall Abortion Debate....


THERE MAY NOT BE SUCH A THING AS A STUPID QUESTION, BUT THERE DO EXIST LOADED QUESTIONS. And that is obviously a loaded question, because it expects anyone trying to answer it to assume certain things about the word "moral" --when The Fact Is, morals are provably arbitrary and therefore worthless. Just go to a bunch of different cultures and ask if it is moral to eat pork, or to drink alcohol, or for a woman's head to be uncovered, and see the proof-of-arbitrariness/worthlessness for yourself.

FORTUNATELY, ETHICS CAN BE NON-ARBITRARY, and thus be superior to morals. All ethics need is an Objectively Verifiable foundation-statement, something like this, perhaps: "Persons need to get-along with each other, for maximum mutual benefit." We have lots and lots of Objectively Verifiable evidence about what can happen when persons don't get along with each other!

YOUR QUESTION CAN BE MODIFIED: "Is abortion an ethical right?"

MORE, ethics can be Universally Applicable, simply because that word "person" was not defined. After all, it should be obvious that if future humans don't get-along with some species of intelligent extraterrestrial alien beings, the result could be an interstellar war, instead of "maximum mutual benefits". Those aliens must be acknowledged to qualify as persons, in order to avoid war and experience benefits!

THEREFORE WE SIMPLY NEED TO THINK ABOUT PERSONHOOD AND UNBORN HUMANS, TO ANSWER THE MODIFIED QUESTION. And when we consider the Facts, such that dolphins have been seriously considered to qualify as persons, while unborn humans cannot pass even one of the many personhood tests that dolphins have been able to pass (and which we expect intelligent aliens will be able to pass), It Is Logically Obvious that unborn humans cannot possibly qualify as persons. Which means that abortion is not a situation in which persons need to get-along with each other!


TOTALLY IRRELEVANT; ONLY PERSONHOOD MATTERS. After all, a fly is a life, and there is no moral or ethical problem with killing it. Ditto with a mosquito or a spider or a rat, or even a herd of cattle that gets slaughtered for a city's dinner. Killing Objectively Provable non-persons like rats and cattle and flies (including unborn humans) is never a situation in which persons need to get-along with each other!

Getting into philosophy a little here, but I would say that ethics could not exist without morals.

 

[DashingAmerican]

Of course there is value, but not the same for every living human cell.

That was more in response to bhodistiva and his response of what does it matter if it's a life?

 

[DashingAmerican]

Do you think a women who has just found out that her baby has no brain should be denied and abortion if she is 13 weeks pregnant? Why can't this decision be between a woman and her doctor?

https://www.cdc.gov/ncbddd/birthdefects/anencephaly.html

There are exceptions to every rule.

 

[DashingAmerican]

PROVED FALSE. It is an extremely common ERROR of abortion opponents to think that human mental development proceeds as inevitably as human physical development, when there are no genetic flaws or other interferences. The proof of that error was discovered in Romania in the 1980s. Human mental development depends on Nurture, not Nature. And since ALL the relevant Nurture happens after birth, at no point prior to birth is it possible for an unborn human to qualify as a person deserving rights. (Technically, it takes a bunch of months after birth for such qualification to even begin to happen, except that Existing Law arbitrarily grants "legal person" status to newborn humans, a Law that existed long before the relevant scientific facts about personhood were discovered.) And if you don't believe in the power of human Nurturing, then you should study the stories of Koko the Gorilla and Chantek the Orangutan.

I should've been more specific, what I meant by left to it's own fruition is "not aborted" or left alone.

 

[DashingAmerican]

Is an egg a chicken before it hatches?

Is it alive?

 

[Pozessed]

I've been reading and listening to a lot of different things lately that really invoke some thinking. The question "Is abortion a moral right?" really stands out.

But to really get into that, I think the you have to ask the question, is the fetus inside a woman, no matter how far along, a life?

Quality of life is more important than quantity of lives. Maybe if we could protect the children that exist better I'd be more in favor of banning abortion. Until then, I don't see an upsurge in foster children being a good thing with current sex trafficking statistics, and other statistics that show children are neglected by their care givers.
If child neglect was not such a major issue for me, I'd still have to consider whether or not I would want my government forcing me to carry an unwanted, unprepared, and potentially hazardous fetus to life. That is borderline slavery to me.

 

[Removable Mind]

I agree that nobody aborts a wanted pregnancy, but are you saying that nobody uses abortion strictly as birth control?

If an abortion is performed and it's not medically necessary - all pro-life advocates will make an attempt to claim that choosing to have an abortion is a form of birth control. No reasons other than for medical reasons will abortion be tolerated by pro-life.

If a pregnancy is deemed to be an obstacle to a woman's life, whatever that obstacle might be. Why is it government's business, religious organizations business, or your business?

And I'm honestly not trying to be disrespectful here. We have our differences, I still think you're a good person. A really decent man. But we both know we'll always be at an impasse on these related issues.

I still have to seriously ask, why is any reason that a woman has to make her choice to abort anyone's business but her own?

 

[FutureIncoming]

Getting into philosophy a little here, but I would say that ethics could not exist without morals.

ANOTHER VIEW MIGHT BE MORE ACCURATE. Ethics may have been created as a philosophical thing specifically because morals are provably arbitrary/flawed. What you wrote might have some truth to it, but it is an incomplete truth.

 

[minnie616]

I agree that nobody aborts a wanted pregnancy, but are you saying that nobody uses abortion strictly as birth control?

Only 14 percent of at risk women who became pregnant and had an abortion within that year had never used birth control or had a gap of one month or more where they did not use birth control.

If a woman is sexually active , fertile and does not use any birth control there is a 54 chance she will be pregnant within one years time. A woman is usually fertile for over 30 years which means if she never uses birth control and strictly uses abortion as birth control she could have 10 to 20 pregnancies during her lifetime. If she choose to only have have 2 children. ( the average woman today ( married or unmarried has 1.8 children ) than she would have had 8 to 18 abortions and/or miscarriages throughout her reproductive years.

From this link:

CONTRACEPTIVE EFFECTIVENESS

• When used correctly, modern contraceptives are very effec- tive at preventing pregnancy.

The two-thirds of U.S. women (68%) at risk of unintended pregnancy who use contracep- tives consistently and correctly throughout the course of any given year account for only 5% of all unintended pregnancies.

The 18% of women at risk who use contraceptives but do so in- consistently account for 41% of unintended pregnancies,

while the 14% of women at risk who do not use contraceptives at
all or have a gap in use of one month or longer account for 54% of unintended pregnancies.

• Contraceptive failure rates are defined as the percentage of users who will become pregnant over the course of one year.

https://www.guttmacher.org/sites/default/files/pdfs/pubs/fb_contr_use.pdf

 

[FutureIncoming]

I should've been more specific, what I meant by left to it's own fruition is "not aborted" or left alone.

I WAS SPECIFICALLY TALKING ABOUT THE LONG-TERM RESULTS OF LEAVING IT ALONE. A fetus will **always** fail to develop a normal human mind. After birth, the only thing it can ever become is a "feral child", basically just a clever animal, like a typical gorilla is a clever animal.

It is **only** through interference with the Natural development process that "normal" human minds develop, and that interference is called "Nurture". In those Romanian orphanages children were physically cared for, but their minds were ignored and therefore never developed to become what we nowadays consider "normal" (even though for more than 100,000 years, all humans were "feral"; it is the Default Natural Level of human mental development).

THEREFORE, since we must interfere with Natural human development to get what we want ("normal" human minds), there is no conflict with other sorts of interference with Natural human development to get what we want (abortion as birth control, especially as a back-up plan for when ordinary contraceptives fail to work reliably).

 

[fmw]

I've been reading and listening to a lot of different things lately that really invoke some thinking. The question "Is abortion a moral right?" really stands out.

But to really get into that, I think the you have to ask the question, is the fetus inside a woman, no matter how far along, a life?

Abortion cannot be right. Valid rights don't cause anyone else to lose something in the exercise of it. It is legally acceptable. No rights involved.

 

[prometeus]

I've lost tracks of how many times I've pointed out the critically fatal flaw in this "argument" of yours

Please do not delude yourself. The only thing if anything that your posts can point to is uneducated, primitive, belligerent thinking that has and always will leave you among the lunatic fringe.

 

[FutureIncoming]

Abortion cannot be right.

YES IT CAN. What is not right is Stupid Prejudice!

Valid rights don't cause anyone else to lose something in the exercise of it.

TOTALLY TRUE OF ABORTION. The problem is the Stupid Lie of claiming an unborn human is more than a mere-animal entity, like a rat is a mere-animal entity, and every 100% human cell in a hydatidiform mole is a mere-animal entity. Neither the rat nor the unborn human nor the hydatidiform mole qualifies as an "anyone else".

It [abortion] is legally acceptable.

TRUE.

No rights involved.

FALSE. The woman has rights, including the right to abort an unwanted pregnancy.

 

[DashingAmerican]

I WAS SPECIFICALLY TALKING ABOUT THE LONG-TERM RESULTS OF LEAVING IT ALONE. A fetus will **always** fail to develop a normal human mind. After birth, the only thing it can ever become is a "feral child", basically just a clever animal, like a typical gorilla is a clever animal.

It is **only** through interference with the Natural development process that "normal" human minds develop, and that interference is called "Nurture". In those Romanian orphanages children were physically cared for, but their minds were ignored and therefore never developed to become what we nowadays consider "normal" (even though for more than 100,000 years, all humans were "feral"; it is the Default Natural Level of human mental development).

THEREFORE, since we must interfere with Natural human development to get what we want ("normal" human minds), there is no conflict with other sorts of interference with Natural human development to get what we want (abortion as birth control, especially as a back-up plan for when ordinary contraceptives fail to work reliably).

If a human child will always be feral without interference, how did we get to where we are? The statement and reality contradicts. Someone had to learn it to teach it. That means somewhere down the road we as humans learned something without being taught it.