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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.