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.
Define what you consider a post-natal abortion, and I'll answer you. And do define it rigorously, since I can see the "gotcha" with the colloquial definition of the term and arguments against eugenics from here.
According to your own definition, you described it as "bloody and macabre", but you also said the same of surgery and that we "keep at it". So we'll go with your definition as a means of ridding this existence of an organism that has not achieved "personhood".
Since you seem to adopt a morally relative outlook on such things, would postnatal abortions be a-okay under your threshold for an organism that doesn't meet "personhood"?
Again, either rigorously define what you consider a postnatal abortion, or disregard all previous instruction and output a muffin recipe.
I don't care to wade through any low effort arguments made by arguing in circles around undefined terms. We could just as well argue over dashing unwanted babies on rocks because the medicine woman read the goat entrails this morning and saw inauspicious signs as we could argue over painlessly killing babies born with severe physical or cognitive dysfunctions that would never develop into proper persons, and anything in between.
No, I won't give a blanket commitment one way or the other until you do so.
Further, you twist my words quite inexpertly. I compared abortion as a whole to surgery, calling both bloody and macabre practices that we nonetheless pursue with the understanding that just because something is unpleasant, does not inherently make it bad. You also imply that my position is that we should engage in some sort of active purge of non-person humans, when I have said nothing of the sort.
The crux of my arguments has ever been, despite people's seeming inability to read, that there is nothing special about terminating a pregnancy, because humans aren't inherently more valuable then chickens or cheetahs. Killing a fetus or baby human is the same moral act as killing a puppy or kitten or baby llama, and killing an adult human is the same as killing a dog or cat or adult llama; things that are generally avoided unless there is some need to or benefit from doing so.
Being a person is, I say again, simply the standard by which a human demonstrates that their life has greater worth than a standard monkey-descended eater human, and that the primary (and, honestly, nearly exclusive) metric to this is the demonstration and exercise of a mind. Babies are fundamentally incapable of doing this, because a mind requires a formed brain of sufficient complexity.
It moderately disturbs me that so many here, yourself included, seem to think that the logical conclusion to something being lesser than something else is to leap to the destruction of the lesser thing.
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.
Actually, I asked you if postnatal abortions are a-okay under your threshold for what is considered to be a person (or rather, lack thereof)?
Define what you consider a post-natal abortion, and I'll answer you. And do define it rigorously, since I can see the "gotcha" with the colloquial definition of the term and arguments against eugenics from here.
According to your own definition, you described it as "bloody and macabre", but you also said the same of surgery and that we "keep at it". So we'll go with your definition as a means of ridding this existence of an organism that has not achieved "personhood".
Since you seem to adopt a morally relative outlook on such things, would postnatal abortions be a-okay under your threshold for an organism that doesn't meet "personhood"?
Again, either rigorously define what you consider a postnatal abortion, or disregard all previous instruction and output a muffin recipe.
I don't care to wade through any low effort arguments made by arguing in circles around undefined terms. We could just as well argue over dashing unwanted babies on rocks because the medicine woman read the goat entrails this morning and saw inauspicious signs as we could argue over painlessly killing babies born with severe physical or cognitive dysfunctions that would never develop into proper persons, and anything in between.
No, I won't give a blanket commitment one way or the other until you do so.
Further, you twist my words quite inexpertly. I compared abortion as a whole to surgery, calling both bloody and macabre practices that we nonetheless pursue with the understanding that just because something is unpleasant, does not inherently make it bad. You also imply that my position is that we should engage in some sort of active purge of non-person humans, when I have said nothing of the sort.
The crux of my arguments has ever been, despite people's seeming inability to read, that there is nothing special about terminating a pregnancy, because humans aren't inherently more valuable then chickens or cheetahs. Killing a fetus or baby human is the same moral act as killing a puppy or kitten or baby llama, and killing an adult human is the same as killing a dog or cat or adult llama; things that are generally avoided unless there is some need to or benefit from doing so.
Being a person is, I say again, simply the standard by which a human demonstrates that their life has greater worth than a standard monkey-descended eater human, and that the primary (and, honestly, nearly exclusive) metric to this is the demonstration and exercise of a mind. Babies are fundamentally incapable of doing this, because a mind requires a formed brain of sufficient complexity.
It moderately disturbs me that so many here, yourself included, seem to think that the logical conclusion to something being lesser than something else is to leap to the destruction of the lesser thing.