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Abortion
Inkstain
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Posted 12/11/07 - 01:26 PM:
Subject: Abortion 		quote post
#1
The issue of abortion has confused me for a while now. I want to hear your ideas on the subject. Should abortion be allowed for women who do not want a child or do not have the means to take care of them, or is abortion a form of murder that should end immediately?

Edited by Inkstain on 12/13/07 - 01:49 PM
When the clock strikes end, will anyone stop to look over their shoulder?
Landlady
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Posted 12/11/07 - 07:17 PM:
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#2
Inkstain wrote:
So in the act of abortion we risk the sin of murder
Inkstain wrote:
I think the best choice is to allow abortion only under extreme cases, such as rape victims and pregnant women under 13.
A fetus (or a potential human being with a soul, if you may) is not responsible for its conception in either case, so by allowing abortion of a raped woman (or one under 13), you would, likewise, risk the "sin of murder" of an innocent.
Inkstain wrote:
If they didn't want to get pregnant, they should have used protection.
It is possible to get pregnant even while using contraception.
Inkstain wrote:
They can give the child to an adoption agency, but they can't just kill an unborn child just to preserve their own looks.
I don't quite understand what you meant by the underlined part. There are many reasons why women choose abortion, and oftentimes, these reasons figure in the welfare of their own (future) child.

Inkstain wrote:
I don't think we should just hand out abortions to any woman who doesn't want a baby.

And I think we should.
There is time to laugh and there is time not to laugh, and this is not one of them. - Insp. Clouseau.
Each man is questioned by life; and he can only answer to life by answering for his own life; to life he can only respond by being responsible. - Frankl.
Swordfishtrombone
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Posted 12/11/07 - 07:38 PM:
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#3
Inkstain wrote:
People who are pro choice are generally athiests, and people who are pro life are generally religious.

Are you sure that this generalization is true? Something like 90% of Americans believe in God, but far less than 90% of them are pro-life.

But when you think about it, how are we able to tell when something is alive or not. Does a child get a soul at it's creation or its birth.


Whether something is 'alive' or not is not really the central issue to the abortion debate. The issue is whether killing it antenatally constitutes murder or not.

From a technical, biological point of view, an organism's life absolutely begins at conception. But you'd have to be at an extreme end of the anti-abortion spectrum to attach much humanity to a fertilized egg.

To ask when a child gets a soul presupposes that 1) there is such a thing, and 2) that we can ever know.

I think we give the soul to our children before they're born. My wife is 22 weeks pregnant. We saw the baby's heart beating at 7 weeks gestation, the day we learned she was pregnant (she's a radiologist, she ultrasounded herself). From that same day we've thought of him as a person, and all the more now that we can feel him kick and roll around.

It's impossible for us, as humans, to tell. So in the act of abortion we risk the sin of murder, and by denying abortion we supposedly take away the rights of women everywhere.

That presupposes sin. We don't make laws based on whether they are sinful or not. I'd like to think that if murder were not a sin in our tradition, we'd still make it against the law.

I think the best choice is to allow abortion only under extreme cases, such as rape victims and pregnant women under 13. I don't think we should just hand out abortions to any woman who doesn't want a baby. If they didn't want to get pregnant, they should have used protection. They can give the child to an adoption agency, but they can't just kill an unborn child just to preserve their own looks. Anyway, that's what I think. Let me hear your thoughts

You're not talking about ethics here. You're talking about policy. Policy is based on compromises that are acceptable to a majority of voters. It's not dependent upon definitions or standards unless that is incorporated into the law. The contingencies you list are not necessarily exclusive, and they are indeed arbitrary (why shouldn't a 14 year old who is impregnated by a 12 year old boy be allowed to have an abortion, for instance?)

How about children with genetic diseases? Can't I recommend an abortion for a woman whose fetus has anencephaly? (this is a condition in which the brain doesn't develop at all, only the brainstem, and the children need full life support for the roughly 2 years that you can keep them alive). Or what if the fetus has Tay-Sachs disease, which will cause progressive disability and death in 100% of children by 3 or 4 years of age. Isn't it ethically worse to bring that child into the world?

What about an ectopic pregnancy, i.e. a genetically normal embryo that implants in the wrong place, i.e. the fallopian tube, and will kill the mother if it's not aborted?

Chew on this one:
Some fertilized eggs never develop into a fetus at all. They turn into a mass of undifferentiated fetal tissue called a molar pregnancy. So you have the product of conception, but instead of a baby it turns into a hydatidiform mole. Worse yet, some of them can actually turn into an invasive choriocarcinoma and cause invasive and metastatic cancer in the mother -- and this, again, is the result of a fertilized egg. Would giving this mother chemotherapy be considered murder? It would if you define murder as killing anything from the fertilized egg onwards.
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Posted 12/12/07 - 12:40 AM:
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#4
I don't mean to offend, but you certainly seem like the type of person who has had little or no contact with the women and girls for which the choice of abortion constitutes so emotional a life decision. You seem to have the conception, propagated by pro-lifers to slander women, of the good-time girl that recklessly failed to use protection and found herself knocked up, but she can't fit into her size 2 miniskirt if her belly starts to bulge, so she has the doctor grab the vacuum in the afternoon so she can be out on the town at night while that little soul floats to heaven.

My, I do enjoy descriptions. In all seriousness, I highly suggest that you, and anyone who wishes to air a voice on the subject, read some narratives written about (good) or by (better) women and girls who are confronted with the choice.
baileyslc
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Posted 12/12/07 - 01:51 PM:
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#5
A large percentage of Americans use emotional and hateful language about abortion to state their beliefs: abortion is immoral and murderous. If you are constantly told how hideous something is, yet your belief is contrary to moral traditions, your response is going to be emotional and the choice extremely difficult. Society will progress only when moral traditions and ideologies are challenged. Otherwise, ideas and beliefs will just become dead dogma.

Edited by baileyslc on 12/12/07 - 08:54 PM
JAC
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Posted 12/13/07 - 12:28 AM:
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#6
Inkstain wrote:
People who are pro choice are generally athiests,

Wrong.

I'm agnostic, so this puts me in an awkward position. I used to be pro choice, thinking that a fetus is not alive because it has not been born. That was my theory in the defense of abortion and stem cell research.

Plants are alive too. Murder is not defined by killing something that is alive, it is defined by killing a person. Do you think a fetus is a person?

But when you think about it, how are we able to tell when something is alive or not. Does a child get a soul at it's creation or its birth.

What's this about a soul? I thought you were agnostic.

And how is the possession of a soul relevant to defining a person? Anything with a soul is a person? Really now?

It's impossible for us, as humans, to tell. So in the act of abortion we risk the sin of murder,

We risk the possibility of murder when we masturbate too. What's your point? Ever watch Monty Python? "Every sperm is sacred."

And by denying abortion we supposedly take away the rights of women everywhere.

I don't think it's a question of rights.

I think the best choice is to allow abortion only under extreme cases, such as rape victims and pregnant women under 13.

So women under 13 can murder, but other women can not? At least attempt to be consistent.

They can give the child to an adoption agency, but they can't just kill an unborn child just to preserve their own looks.

Wow... Are you, by any chance, a misogynist?
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Inkstain
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Posted 12/13/07 - 01:47 PM:
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#7
Yeah, you know what. I kind of screwed up on my philosophy statement. I was inconsistent, and mistaken in parts, and I realize it. I have removed my previous ideas from my first post, and would like to revise.

I think I'm going to side entirely with pro-life now, without a medium for extreme cases. I do not wish to use slander against women. I know that pregnancy is an emotional and painful issue for women, but when there is an unborn child in the matter, murder seems to extreme an option to avoid these issues.

I stand by the idea that a child, even still in the womb, is alive, and I don't see how killing an innocent child can be justified.

In any case, there is always the alternative of adoption. In this, the mother does not have the trouble of having to care for a child that she doesn't want to or altogether can't, and the child is able to have a life that he/she would otherwise be denied if the abortion had taken place.

The only real exception is when the baby is going to die anyway, and potentially kill the mother. There have been cases of parasitic fetuses, and in this abortion is obviously ok because it is the only option for at least one of them to survive.

Otherwise, I feel that abortion is just not a good method.
When the clock strikes end, will anyone stop to look over their shoulder?
Swordfishtrombone
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Posted 12/13/07 - 02:18 PM:
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#8
How is this a philosophical discussion?

The basis for decision cannot be based on defining what is alive. Clearly a metabolically active zygote (a fertilized egg) is alive. But if a mother happens to be 4 weeks pregnant and inadvertently takes a medicine that aborts the fetus (before she even knows she's pregnant), is that manslaughter? Is that criminally negligent homicide?

You just can't apply the standards of murder law to abortion. It's logically, ethically, and philosophically inconsistent.

Furthermore, you have a view of this issue that completely neglects any counterargument as to why having legal abortion may be advantageous to society and to individuals. Like, for instance, the fact that banning abortion probably won't change at all the number of abortions -- but it will increase the number of women who die because of back alley abortions. It also takes away the power of women to make informed decisions about their own body. And about their own life, because a woman who gets raped should not have to sacrifice her education and career just to raise the spawn of some animal who forcibly impregnated her.

Oh, and you think adoption is a reasonable option? Tell me how many kids live out their lives in foster homes waiting to be adopted before presuming that there are THAT many people who want to adopt.
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baileyslc
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Posted 12/13/07 - 03:04 PM:
Subject: Dead Beat Dad vs. Murderous Mom 		quote post
#9
Inkstain wrote:
The issue of abortion has confused me for a while now. I want to hear your ideas on the subject. Should abortion be allowed for women who do not want a child or do not have the means to take care of them, or is abortion a form of murder that should end immediately?


Setting aside individual circumstance that can be presented in an infinite amount of combinations, the fact is:
All choices lead to a consequence.
Men are given the option to completely reverse their "mistake" by signing away all rights (this is the term society uses, rights must then be applicable) whenever they decide it best. This may result in being labeled a "dead beat dad". But, if women want an option to change their situation early on before it takes over their life it is labeled murder.

Is this a double standard and unjust? Should groups in society dictate what they consider moral over people being allowed the same rights?

Again, with all factors and “what-ifs” set aside: Is it moral, legal and/or just for a society to tell only woman that if they voluntarily engage in sex the risk of pregnancy and responsibility should always be in their (the person born with a uterus) mind? Should women be able to have an option, like men do, before they are affected and invested physically, emotionally, financially and possible public harassment for at least nine months?

(Inkstain, I’m also very interested with what this discussion can bring. I’m glad you posted this topic)
MagicalLobster
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Posted 12/16/07 - 01:51 PM:
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#10
The problem I see with abortion is the fact that it's put up on a pedestal. Personally, I think it's one of the last things this world needs to worry about. You see so many people trying to put an end to it for their own moral reasons, and people who are all for it because they feel it is their right and their body and so on and so forth.

What I don't understand is how this debate made it's way up into the categories of bigger worldy issues such as starvation, war, death sentences, terrorism, etc. For someone to think that a female getting an abortion is even close to the travesty of terrorism or issues such as the ones mentioned makes me terribly angry. I think that abortion is something to be dealed with after other worldy issues are at rest. I think although people do have the choice of getting an abortion, people have just as much a choice to go on a drug raid or shoot up an orphanage. It's all about whether you think it's moral for yourself, if you ask me. Do you think it's wrong for you to get one? There's too many people trying to judge others for it or change people's actions, when I bet half of them would do the same thing if they were in that position. It's a lot easier said than done if you ask me. If you think you're a moral person because you wouldn't do it...well, that's a little shaky. Unless your someone whos made the choice and been through it and proven themselves true to that belief, I don't think they have the right to judge others.
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