I'll be honest, this type of "gotcha" interrogation is both ghoulish and pointless.
For the latter, the people who already agree with you won't agree with you harder. The people who disagree with you won't suddenly change their minds. The wilfully ignorant will twist themselves into pretzels to remain willfully ignorant. It accomplishes nothing.
And for the former, this really comes off like asking a gun rights advocate what his favorite way of killing someone is. Yes, yes, I know someone is just itching to shout "guns are Constitutionally Protected and abortion isn't", but let's set that aside for a second.
Quite honestly, the goal of an abortion is a dead fetus safely extracted from the host mother. The method really doesn't matter. You still get a dead fetus, whether you use a magic pill that teleports it into the sun or an industrial vacuum to remove it by parts.
And for anyone who wants to make a moral "you're killing a person" argument, understand that, for anyone who isn't an adherent to the whole "life begins at conception" idea, a fetus isn't a person; it hasn't developed any of the characteristics that define personhood besides a shared DNA structure. And, quite frankly, calling a fetus a baby in this context is trying to emotionally manipulate people by making them imagine a full grown and birthed 9+ month old infant getting shoved into a blender, instead of the weird chicken-fish hybrid looking thing that a fetus spends the first four months resembling. This adds to the ghoulishness of the interrogation, and puts people off, circling back around to the pointless nature of it.
Abortion IS ghoulish. Abortion is straight up ending a human life at its most vulnerable. You can split hairs all you want about time and location, but there's a reason "You should have been aborted" is a horrible thing to say to someone. Guns are used for food, sport and self defense far more than they are for murder. Trying to "Gotcha" someone about the use of guns is like a vegan telling a carnivore about how brutal butchering is. Life is harsh, and sometimes you have to be harsh right back to deal with it.
People NEED to have their noses rubbed in the reality of what abortion fundamentally is, because people file it away under "Women's rights/Healthcare" and then lock it up tight to dodge the cognitive dissonance of "This is literally a mother committing infanticide to dodge the consequences of her own actions." It's Kronos devouring his children, writ large.
Confronting the process of Abortion being considered a "gotcha" is the same kind of euphemism treadmill that makes any term describing the LGBTETC become a slur over time. The thing that is being described is inherently offensive on a fundamental level, which is why we're just not supposed to think about it and accept it.
I'd like to say first, before I disagree with you, that I do appreciate that you argue in good faith and express your views properly, unlike how a lot of the gutter scum of the internet just throw an attempt at a pithy rejoinder on top of an insult, pat themselves on the back, and walk away. It's refreshing to have a discussion, instead of the usual tripe.
That said, I'd like to address your points in order. For the first point, your argument basically proves my own. You specifically label a fetus as a human life, and base your argumentation around the idea that a human life carries some inherent value, even when the organism that actually makes up that human is simply not there. Notice how you focus on "human" and I specifically keep saying "person"; the two are deeply intertwined, but not actually synonymous (which, if we ever actually make AI and/or find aliens, a lot of people are going to need to come to terms with). A fetus is an in-progress human, but it's not a person yet. It won't be a person for years, because personhood requires a brain complex enough to develop self-awareness.
You yourself land upon this with your reference to the "you should have been aborted" insult, but you wander away from the logical conclusion; the insult is not denying the human-ness of the person, but instead implying the person-ness of the person being insulted is so sub-par that it would have been better if they had never been. The insultee's human-ness, which is inherent to them, is never brought into question; only the achievements and accomplishments they have made that forms the ontological record of their person-ness is under attack. (Sorry if this bit sounds like an old man repeating himself, but there's only so many ways to say this when reinforcing the premise.)
As for abortion itself, it certainly is bloody and macabre. I doubt the mentality of anyone who disagrees with that. However, so is surgery, and yet we keep at it. Something being unpleasant does not inherently make it bad.
I also agree entirely with you that people need to understand what abortion entails. Too many people think it is, in fact, some magic pill that teleports the problem away. However, as I don't accept the "human life is inherently valuable" argumentation, I must also disagree with you on the notion that the avoidance of consequences is inherently negative. We've built our entire species' history around avoiding consequences. We invented farming, tamed animals, built machines, and raised massive edifices to avoid the consequences of being born as upstart descendents of monkeys, doomed to eat, reproduce, and die in the woods. There is nothing inherently wrong with wanting a comforts level life free of consequences or suffering; it's why we're sitting in houses with AC, heating, running water, fridges full of food, and chatting across the globe using the magic boxes of nano-scale runes powered by caged lightning. You mention Kronos eating his own children as a failing, bit that's the moral of the story from Zeus' perspective, and he grew up to be a massive net negative on the local divinities. From Kronos' perspective, his only flaw was not checking that he was eating a baby instead of a stone, and that's more a moral lesson about not blindly trusting people with mission-critical tasks.
Finally, returning to my original point about it being ghoulish, the last point I want to tackle is how absurd it is to try to make a "right and proper" moral argumentation while violating every single practice of proprietary in debate. The congressman, quite frankly, did himself no favors with how he presented himself, while the activist stayed respectably professional despite it. You cannot simply ask what someone's favorite method of killing a man is (or, I mean, you generally can't - I don't know what lunatic standard the Epstein Island Enthusiast political class have developed in their little cabals) and then start going down a list, pausing after each one and saying "is it this one?", and still present yourself as the right and honorable man standing up to evil. There are standards and ways things are done, and this is quite a ways beyond them. So far beyond them that it begins even to discredit his own position to the general audience, who we both know are neither intelligent enough to understand debates nor objective enough to go by anything other than "feels" and "vibes".
A fetus is an in-progress human, but it's not a person yet. It won't be a person for years, because personhood requires a brain complex enough to develop self-awareness.
So anyone who suffers from neurological disorders that prevent them from establishing your threshold of personhood aren't actually human beings and therefore, postnatal abortions are a-okay?
You're missing the point so spectacularly, I cannot tell if you're doing it maliciously or just with great aplomb of foolishness.
Yes, having neurological conditions that prevent you from developing a functioning adult mind preclude you from being a person. No, it doesn't remove your base human-ness.
How you move from that to "let's just murder retards because they are lesser" is your cross to carry.
Buddy, if you disagree but refuse to put in the effort to argue in good faith, you're the redditor you accuse others of being.
Imagine, if you can, the possibility that the constant purity spirals and ideological cleansings of social media have forced us to cohabitate, and only agree on seventy five to eighty percent of things. But if you can't, see if you can find someone to change your smoke alarm batteries, at least.
I get that modern internet discourse makes strange bedfellows but you've commented a grand total of five times in the last three years, including the two comments in this thread. I suppose it makes us wonder why you chose this topic and this take specifically.
Funny story, actually. I was using a different account for ages because I'd forgotten the password to this one, and in a strange coincidence, lost the password to that one due to file corruption and found saved credentials to this one on an old device I had around the house I was getting ready to recycle.
The stupid shit that happens when you use password manager generated passwords and refuse to provide legitimate emails when signing up for websites to shoot the shit with people you don't know and don't need to know.
Though I will chastise you on trying to creep on my post history. I don't know how or when that behavior became normalized, but it's absurd that people do that. Our older conversations were between ourselves and whomever we were speaking with at the time, and not something for random lookie-loos to ogle at at arbitrary points in the future, devoid of context and ontological involvement in the discourse.
Anyway, the actual human behind the account has been around in one coat or another for ages, and I usually make the same arguments on topics. I think this one just lacks my old block list - the same people tend to say the same nonsense around here, so you end up having far fewer arguments when you actively avoid each other.
a fetus isn't a person; it hasn't developed any of the characteristics that define personhood besides a shared DNA structure.
A twenty-one week old fetus can survive birth - the older of the two I know about is now approaching his sixth birthday. If we were talking about the morning after pill then what you said could be relevant, but there can be no defense of late term abortion when medical science is rolling back the point of viability and exposing just who is being killed.
I can't think of a way to say this without it sounding condescending, so please understand that that's not the intended tone here.
Are you familiar with the idea of averages and statistics? Because you're making the standard leftist woman argumentation that, just because they can think of a single incident that doesn't 100% align with the statistical norm, this disproves the whole idea.
Yes, a miniscule percentage of non-viable fetuses can be artificially forced to complete the gestation cycle IF we apply the frankly astounding capabilities of modern medical science. This doesn't actually disprove anything I've said, though, and in fact supports my argumentation. They're still not viable organisms at that stage; if they were, they wouldn't need advanced NICUs and trained clinicians with specialized knowledge. And even these artificially sustained humans don't achieve personhood until many years post birth, because they STILL need to keep growing to develop the necessary brain complexity.
For early and mid-term abortions, no naturally viable human is being killed. For very late term abortions, a viable human is being killed, but no person is being killed. At worst, you've wasted the energy and resources you've spent gestating the child to that point, but the actual spark of personhood is maybe 1/5th of the way to being ignited at the time a baby is born.
but the actual spark of personhood is maybe 1/5th of the way to being ignited at the time a baby is born.
Says who? By that logic it should be legal to kill a toddler up to the point they become self-aware (I'm guessing that's the arbitrary metric you're using to denote 'personhood').
You're making this distinction between a 'human' and a 'person' that is entirely in your own head.
PK Dick wrote a short story about just that: the future society where you are only considered "human" if you can do some simple calculus. Before that? You can be "recycled" at the whim of your mother (NOT the father!), usually around age 8 or 9. He got more hate mail, back in the 60's! for that one than all the rest combined. Actual mail, eh? Someone paid money to tell him that they hate him.
Daemon Knight had a similar story. Until you turn 16? Your parents can send you "to the adoption agency" which sounds great, eh? Except the 'agency' just keeps you for 6 months, then harvests your organs. The chance of actual adoption is close to zero.
So kids in that story are amazing. They get up in the morning, cook & clean, pay close attention in school, never get in trouble!
The story is about such a boy, 14 and his parents decide to go on vacation on another planet. It's too bothersome to take him along, or even ask relatives to care for him, so they order him to go to the "adoption center". Dark!
Well, in this case, says me, because I am the ultimate arbiter of my morality, much as you are of yours.
Also, you're moving away from the debate. You've brought the question of legality into it, making the depressingly common attempt to take "legal" and "good"/"moral" together, when the two have zero bearing on one another.
And self-awareness is an intersting metric to consider, but even that paltry standard disqualifies huge swathes of people across the globe from personhood, let alone my preferred standard of self-actualization. Think about the average "doctor, lawyer, engineer" who dindu nuffin, or the average pajeet, or the average "refugees welcome" leftist. Many of them would, I think, at least be able to look in a mirror and identify the self and how the self differs from the not-self, but how many have a proper internal monologue, or the ability to imagine and rotate the apple, or even to comprehend the idea of second order effects, let alone predict them?
No, there's more to personhood then the mirror, and we tend to bet on humans since we are the sole species on this planet currently able to produce st least some members that qualify as persons, even if large numbers never make it that far.
You could, perhaps, make a solid argument in the wasted POTENTIAL of any given aborted fetus or baby, that he or she may have one day become a person and contributed to the sprecies at large, but no one ever does. It's always just "muh humans are le special" argumentation for an inherent worth that simply doesn't exist.
So killing a human is OK, but killing a "person" is wrong?
Reductive nonsense; you should know that's not what I've said.
Killing a human is morally equivalent to killing any other animal, absent special considerations. Personhood is one of these special considerations; you would certainly understand how one might be more reticent to arbitrarily execute a brilliant scientist or artist then a random beggar off the street for the same crime, for example. The doer and thinker carry more value to their existence that the eater or the junkie.
What's the difference? Aren't all "persons" also humans? Or can chimps be "persons" too?
I'm not going through the whole thing again. If you don't understand by now, you can't understand at all.
No, chimps or other great apes can't be persons. They lack the minds for it.
That's the secret sauce. A mind. Not just a brain running pattern recognition subroutines built into it by millions of years of evolutionary pressure.
And a great many humans alive today have nothing more than a very complex pattern recognition engine made of meat in their skulls, so they are not persons.
You mention DNA. Did you know that after (iirc) 5th cell division the developing fetus (or whatever it is called at that point) no longer 'borrows' DNA from the mother? It has its own, unique DNA.
How do you define who is human and what is not? By DNA of course.
BTW "full term abortions" are very real. 9 months along, they "crown" the fetus, carve its skull open & scoop out the brains. Then cut it up to extract. Hundreds, if not thousands every year.
Several Blue States have laws allowing doctors & nurses to refuse treatment of a fetus if it gets delivered accidentally during the abortion. It lays on the floor until it stops crying. That's not as common but if it never happens? Why pass laws allowing this?
I'm not sure what point you think you're making with the DNA argument. I just referenced it in terms of the general human genome; most you talk to think having human DNA makes you inherently special, and I disagree with the idea of inherent worth.
Yes, I am aware of full term abortions. Honestly, I don't know why they bother at that point; just take the baby out and shoot it or something, if you're so intent on killing it no matter what. The whole process as it stands just sounds like a massive waste of time and resources.
As far as the laws, I fully support them standing. I don't believe it is moral to compel people to provide services they do not wish to provide. Besides, give me an actual number for how often those even come into play. People who become doctors and nurses tend to have some specific mindsets about helping people and caring for them. What's the actual number of times this needs to happen?
And further, what are the circumstances? If they just need to wait for the baby to "stop crying", then you're describing a situation where a mortal wound has already been inflicted, and death is the awaited outcome. These laws would, in such circumstances, merely prevent hostile rent-seeking lawsuits demanding to know why the 80% aborted baby wasn't magically brought back to perfect health after it was discharged from the mother.
Having human DNA makes you, you know, human. A chimp has "similar" DNA but it isn't 100% the same & therefor a chimp is not a human. Or a person either.
DNA is the only thing that scientifically measures if you are a human or not. An opera singer or a person in a coma are both humans even if one of them can't move or speak. They both have human DNA. Different of course, but within the boundaries of what a human has.
As I said. Performing an abortion, the baby pops out still alive. You are allowed, in some Democrat states, to kill it even after birth. If it can cry it is fully developed, ok? "Mortal wound"? You DO know what babies do, yes? They cry.
You seem either unwilling or unable to understand that the basic quality of "being a human" is not what is dissgreed upon here. We have accepted "these fetuses and babies are human" as a foundation of our debate.
The disagreement stems from whether or not being human entitles something to inherent worth. Your camp appears to say yes, because it makes you feel good. I say no, and draw the distinction between "merely human", those who share the human genome, and "human person", those who bother share the human genome and have a mind beyond the pure meat of their biology. I posit that only the second group has value, and only because they demonstrate that value through accomplishment.
And crying is no evidence by itself of a viable baby. It is evidence of functioning vocal cords, inflating lungs, and just enough brain activity to use these two things to make noise. A severely mentally retarded adult human can cry as well, but you wouldn't say he or she is a functioning person, would you?
If you can leave a baby to lie on the floor and cry briefly before it dies, that baby has a mortal wound (perhaps from a botched brain extraction or the like). A normal, healthy baby will not die if you leave it lying on the ground for a while; it will, generally, tire itself out a d go to sleep.
You need to actually think about things before you say them.
So why should I, or anyone here, even listen to you? You haven't demonstrated any worth that I've seen.
For that matter, why should you have the right to speak at all? Or to not be enslaved? Or to not be killed by the government and your organs auctioned to billionaires?
All of those rights derive from the (Christian) concept of inherent worth that you casually discard. You are using those rights to argue against themselves so your words are less than useless.
And for the former, this really comes off like asking a gun rights advocate what his favorite way of killing someone is. Yes, yes, I know someone is just itching to shout "guns are Constitutionally Protected and abortion isn't", but let's set that aside for a second.
Nice try. Immediately setting up a straw man to hide the initial error. Asking an abortion rights advocate about their favorite kind of abortion is like asking a gun rights advocate what their favorite kind of gun is. For your your analogy to work, the second person would have to be a "killing people advocate."
Guns can be owned and used without killing. Abortion always entails abortion.
I'll be honest, this type of "gotcha" interrogation is both ghoulish and pointless.
For the latter, the people who already agree with you won't agree with you harder. The people who disagree with you won't suddenly change their minds. The wilfully ignorant will twist themselves into pretzels to remain willfully ignorant. It accomplishes nothing.
And for the former, this really comes off like asking a gun rights advocate what his favorite way of killing someone is. Yes, yes, I know someone is just itching to shout "guns are Constitutionally Protected and abortion isn't", but let's set that aside for a second.
Quite honestly, the goal of an abortion is a dead fetus safely extracted from the host mother. The method really doesn't matter. You still get a dead fetus, whether you use a magic pill that teleports it into the sun or an industrial vacuum to remove it by parts.
And for anyone who wants to make a moral "you're killing a person" argument, understand that, for anyone who isn't an adherent to the whole "life begins at conception" idea, a fetus isn't a person; it hasn't developed any of the characteristics that define personhood besides a shared DNA structure. And, quite frankly, calling a fetus a baby in this context is trying to emotionally manipulate people by making them imagine a full grown and birthed 9+ month old infant getting shoved into a blender, instead of the weird chicken-fish hybrid looking thing that a fetus spends the first four months resembling. This adds to the ghoulishness of the interrogation, and puts people off, circling back around to the pointless nature of it.
Abortion IS ghoulish. Abortion is straight up ending a human life at its most vulnerable. You can split hairs all you want about time and location, but there's a reason "You should have been aborted" is a horrible thing to say to someone. Guns are used for food, sport and self defense far more than they are for murder. Trying to "Gotcha" someone about the use of guns is like a vegan telling a carnivore about how brutal butchering is. Life is harsh, and sometimes you have to be harsh right back to deal with it.
People NEED to have their noses rubbed in the reality of what abortion fundamentally is, because people file it away under "Women's rights/Healthcare" and then lock it up tight to dodge the cognitive dissonance of "This is literally a mother committing infanticide to dodge the consequences of her own actions." It's Kronos devouring his children, writ large.
Confronting the process of Abortion being considered a "gotcha" is the same kind of euphemism treadmill that makes any term describing the LGBTETC become a slur over time. The thing that is being described is inherently offensive on a fundamental level, which is why we're just not supposed to think about it and accept it.
I'd like to say first, before I disagree with you, that I do appreciate that you argue in good faith and express your views properly, unlike how a lot of the gutter scum of the internet just throw an attempt at a pithy rejoinder on top of an insult, pat themselves on the back, and walk away. It's refreshing to have a discussion, instead of the usual tripe.
That said, I'd like to address your points in order. For the first point, your argument basically proves my own. You specifically label a fetus as a human life, and base your argumentation around the idea that a human life carries some inherent value, even when the organism that actually makes up that human is simply not there. Notice how you focus on "human" and I specifically keep saying "person"; the two are deeply intertwined, but not actually synonymous (which, if we ever actually make AI and/or find aliens, a lot of people are going to need to come to terms with). A fetus is an in-progress human, but it's not a person yet. It won't be a person for years, because personhood requires a brain complex enough to develop self-awareness.
You yourself land upon this with your reference to the "you should have been aborted" insult, but you wander away from the logical conclusion; the insult is not denying the human-ness of the person, but instead implying the person-ness of the person being insulted is so sub-par that it would have been better if they had never been. The insultee's human-ness, which is inherent to them, is never brought into question; only the achievements and accomplishments they have made that forms the ontological record of their person-ness is under attack. (Sorry if this bit sounds like an old man repeating himself, but there's only so many ways to say this when reinforcing the premise.)
As for abortion itself, it certainly is bloody and macabre. I doubt the mentality of anyone who disagrees with that. However, so is surgery, and yet we keep at it. Something being unpleasant does not inherently make it bad.
I also agree entirely with you that people need to understand what abortion entails. Too many people think it is, in fact, some magic pill that teleports the problem away. However, as I don't accept the "human life is inherently valuable" argumentation, I must also disagree with you on the notion that the avoidance of consequences is inherently negative. We've built our entire species' history around avoiding consequences. We invented farming, tamed animals, built machines, and raised massive edifices to avoid the consequences of being born as upstart descendents of monkeys, doomed to eat, reproduce, and die in the woods. There is nothing inherently wrong with wanting a comforts level life free of consequences or suffering; it's why we're sitting in houses with AC, heating, running water, fridges full of food, and chatting across the globe using the magic boxes of nano-scale runes powered by caged lightning. You mention Kronos eating his own children as a failing, bit that's the moral of the story from Zeus' perspective, and he grew up to be a massive net negative on the local divinities. From Kronos' perspective, his only flaw was not checking that he was eating a baby instead of a stone, and that's more a moral lesson about not blindly trusting people with mission-critical tasks.
Finally, returning to my original point about it being ghoulish, the last point I want to tackle is how absurd it is to try to make a "right and proper" moral argumentation while violating every single practice of proprietary in debate. The congressman, quite frankly, did himself no favors with how he presented himself, while the activist stayed respectably professional despite it. You cannot simply ask what someone's favorite method of killing a man is (or, I mean, you generally can't - I don't know what lunatic standard the Epstein Island Enthusiast political class have developed in their little cabals) and then start going down a list, pausing after each one and saying "is it this one?", and still present yourself as the right and honorable man standing up to evil. There are standards and ways things are done, and this is quite a ways beyond them. So far beyond them that it begins even to discredit his own position to the general audience, who we both know are neither intelligent enough to understand debates nor objective enough to go by anything other than "feels" and "vibes".
So anyone who suffers from neurological disorders that prevent them from establishing your threshold of personhood aren't actually human beings and therefore, postnatal abortions are a-okay?
You're missing the point so spectacularly, I cannot tell if you're doing it maliciously or just with great aplomb of foolishness.
Yes, having neurological conditions that prevent you from developing a functioning adult mind preclude you from being a person. No, it doesn't remove your base human-ness.
How you move from that to "let's just murder retards because they are lesser" is your cross to carry.
I knew as soon as I started reading this block of text that it was going to end with a defense of abortion. Back to reddit with ye
Buddy, if you disagree but refuse to put in the effort to argue in good faith, you're the redditor you accuse others of being.
Imagine, if you can, the possibility that the constant purity spirals and ideological cleansings of social media have forced us to cohabitate, and only agree on seventy five to eighty percent of things. But if you can't, see if you can find someone to change your smoke alarm batteries, at least.
I get that modern internet discourse makes strange bedfellows but you've commented a grand total of five times in the last three years, including the two comments in this thread. I suppose it makes us wonder why you chose this topic and this take specifically.
Funny story, actually. I was using a different account for ages because I'd forgotten the password to this one, and in a strange coincidence, lost the password to that one due to file corruption and found saved credentials to this one on an old device I had around the house I was getting ready to recycle.
The stupid shit that happens when you use password manager generated passwords and refuse to provide legitimate emails when signing up for websites to shoot the shit with people you don't know and don't need to know.
Though I will chastise you on trying to creep on my post history. I don't know how or when that behavior became normalized, but it's absurd that people do that. Our older conversations were between ourselves and whomever we were speaking with at the time, and not something for random lookie-loos to ogle at at arbitrary points in the future, devoid of context and ontological involvement in the discourse.
Anyway, the actual human behind the account has been around in one coat or another for ages, and I usually make the same arguments on topics. I think this one just lacks my old block list - the same people tend to say the same nonsense around here, so you end up having far fewer arguments when you actively avoid each other.
A twenty-one week old fetus can survive birth - the older of the two I know about is now approaching his sixth birthday. If we were talking about the morning after pill then what you said could be relevant, but there can be no defense of late term abortion when medical science is rolling back the point of viability and exposing just who is being killed.
I can't think of a way to say this without it sounding condescending, so please understand that that's not the intended tone here.
Are you familiar with the idea of averages and statistics? Because you're making the standard leftist woman argumentation that, just because they can think of a single incident that doesn't 100% align with the statistical norm, this disproves the whole idea.
Yes, a miniscule percentage of non-viable fetuses can be artificially forced to complete the gestation cycle IF we apply the frankly astounding capabilities of modern medical science. This doesn't actually disprove anything I've said, though, and in fact supports my argumentation. They're still not viable organisms at that stage; if they were, they wouldn't need advanced NICUs and trained clinicians with specialized knowledge. And even these artificially sustained humans don't achieve personhood until many years post birth, because they STILL need to keep growing to develop the necessary brain complexity.
For early and mid-term abortions, no naturally viable human is being killed. For very late term abortions, a viable human is being killed, but no person is being killed. At worst, you've wasted the energy and resources you've spent gestating the child to that point, but the actual spark of personhood is maybe 1/5th of the way to being ignited at the time a baby is born.
Says who? By that logic it should be legal to kill a toddler up to the point they become self-aware (I'm guessing that's the arbitrary metric you're using to denote 'personhood').
You're making this distinction between a 'human' and a 'person' that is entirely in your own head.
PK Dick wrote a short story about just that: the future society where you are only considered "human" if you can do some simple calculus. Before that? You can be "recycled" at the whim of your mother (NOT the father!), usually around age 8 or 9. He got more hate mail, back in the 60's! for that one than all the rest combined. Actual mail, eh? Someone paid money to tell him that they hate him.
Daemon Knight had a similar story. Until you turn 16? Your parents can send you "to the adoption agency" which sounds great, eh? Except the 'agency' just keeps you for 6 months, then harvests your organs. The chance of actual adoption is close to zero.
So kids in that story are amazing. They get up in the morning, cook & clean, pay close attention in school, never get in trouble!
The story is about such a boy, 14 and his parents decide to go on vacation on another planet. It's too bothersome to take him along, or even ask relatives to care for him, so they order him to go to the "adoption center". Dark!
Lordlavalamp is the sort of person that small communities quietly dispose of in the woods. You can't have reptiles like that around people you love.
Well, in this case, says me, because I am the ultimate arbiter of my morality, much as you are of yours.
Also, you're moving away from the debate. You've brought the question of legality into it, making the depressingly common attempt to take "legal" and "good"/"moral" together, when the two have zero bearing on one another.
And self-awareness is an intersting metric to consider, but even that paltry standard disqualifies huge swathes of people across the globe from personhood, let alone my preferred standard of self-actualization. Think about the average "doctor, lawyer, engineer" who dindu nuffin, or the average pajeet, or the average "refugees welcome" leftist. Many of them would, I think, at least be able to look in a mirror and identify the self and how the self differs from the not-self, but how many have a proper internal monologue, or the ability to imagine and rotate the apple, or even to comprehend the idea of second order effects, let alone predict them?
No, there's more to personhood then the mirror, and we tend to bet on humans since we are the sole species on this planet currently able to produce st least some members that qualify as persons, even if large numbers never make it that far.
You could, perhaps, make a solid argument in the wasted POTENTIAL of any given aborted fetus or baby, that he or she may have one day become a person and contributed to the sprecies at large, but no one ever does. It's always just "muh humans are le special" argumentation for an inherent worth that simply doesn't exist.
So killing a human is OK, but killing a "person" is wrong?
What's the difference? Aren't all "persons" also humans? Or can chimps be "persons" too?
"A person's a person no matter how small!"
Reductive nonsense; you should know that's not what I've said.
Killing a human is morally equivalent to killing any other animal, absent special considerations. Personhood is one of these special considerations; you would certainly understand how one might be more reticent to arbitrarily execute a brilliant scientist or artist then a random beggar off the street for the same crime, for example. The doer and thinker carry more value to their existence that the eater or the junkie.
I'm not going through the whole thing again. If you don't understand by now, you can't understand at all.
No, chimps or other great apes can't be persons. They lack the minds for it.
That's the secret sauce. A mind. Not just a brain running pattern recognition subroutines built into it by millions of years of evolutionary pressure.
And a great many humans alive today have nothing more than a very complex pattern recognition engine made of meat in their skulls, so they are not persons.
You're subhuman
You mention DNA. Did you know that after (iirc) 5th cell division the developing fetus (or whatever it is called at that point) no longer 'borrows' DNA from the mother? It has its own, unique DNA.
How do you define who is human and what is not? By DNA of course.
BTW "full term abortions" are very real. 9 months along, they "crown" the fetus, carve its skull open & scoop out the brains. Then cut it up to extract. Hundreds, if not thousands every year.
Several Blue States have laws allowing doctors & nurses to refuse treatment of a fetus if it gets delivered accidentally during the abortion. It lays on the floor until it stops crying. That's not as common but if it never happens? Why pass laws allowing this?
I'm not sure what point you think you're making with the DNA argument. I just referenced it in terms of the general human genome; most you talk to think having human DNA makes you inherently special, and I disagree with the idea of inherent worth.
Yes, I am aware of full term abortions. Honestly, I don't know why they bother at that point; just take the baby out and shoot it or something, if you're so intent on killing it no matter what. The whole process as it stands just sounds like a massive waste of time and resources.
As far as the laws, I fully support them standing. I don't believe it is moral to compel people to provide services they do not wish to provide. Besides, give me an actual number for how often those even come into play. People who become doctors and nurses tend to have some specific mindsets about helping people and caring for them. What's the actual number of times this needs to happen?
And further, what are the circumstances? If they just need to wait for the baby to "stop crying", then you're describing a situation where a mortal wound has already been inflicted, and death is the awaited outcome. These laws would, in such circumstances, merely prevent hostile rent-seeking lawsuits demanding to know why the 80% aborted baby wasn't magically brought back to perfect health after it was discharged from the mother.
Having human DNA makes you, you know, human. A chimp has "similar" DNA but it isn't 100% the same & therefor a chimp is not a human. Or a person either.
DNA is the only thing that scientifically measures if you are a human or not. An opera singer or a person in a coma are both humans even if one of them can't move or speak. They both have human DNA. Different of course, but within the boundaries of what a human has.
This mindset?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kermit_Gosnell
As I said. Performing an abortion, the baby pops out still alive. You are allowed, in some Democrat states, to kill it even after birth. If it can cry it is fully developed, ok? "Mortal wound"? You DO know what babies do, yes? They cry.
You seem either unwilling or unable to understand that the basic quality of "being a human" is not what is dissgreed upon here. We have accepted "these fetuses and babies are human" as a foundation of our debate.
The disagreement stems from whether or not being human entitles something to inherent worth. Your camp appears to say yes, because it makes you feel good. I say no, and draw the distinction between "merely human", those who share the human genome, and "human person", those who bother share the human genome and have a mind beyond the pure meat of their biology. I posit that only the second group has value, and only because they demonstrate that value through accomplishment.
And crying is no evidence by itself of a viable baby. It is evidence of functioning vocal cords, inflating lungs, and just enough brain activity to use these two things to make noise. A severely mentally retarded adult human can cry as well, but you wouldn't say he or she is a functioning person, would you?
If you can leave a baby to lie on the floor and cry briefly before it dies, that baby has a mortal wound (perhaps from a botched brain extraction or the like). A normal, healthy baby will not die if you leave it lying on the ground for a while; it will, generally, tire itself out a d go to sleep.
You need to actually think about things before you say them.
So why should I, or anyone here, even listen to you? You haven't demonstrated any worth that I've seen.
For that matter, why should you have the right to speak at all? Or to not be enslaved? Or to not be killed by the government and your organs auctioned to billionaires?
All of those rights derive from the (Christian) concept of inherent worth that you casually discard. You are using those rights to argue against themselves so your words are less than useless.
Nice try. Immediately setting up a straw man to hide the initial error. Asking an abortion rights advocate about their favorite kind of abortion is like asking a gun rights advocate what their favorite kind of gun is. For your your analogy to work, the second person would have to be a "killing people advocate."
Guns can be owned and used without killing. Abortion always entails abortion.