The Effect of "Abortion Rights" on the Political Landscape

[AndreusMaximus]

I don't see any bold text. It's all bold, so nothing is bold.

I'll address the absolute morals vs transient morals though. Absolute morals transcend time and culture. That's why I can use universality to treat a moral as absolute. Transient morals are localized to a given time and/or culture/society. So I'm not a moral relativist. There are absolute morals. Murder is an absolute moral. Virtually every society across time and culture has that as a moral. Even cannibals have a concept of murder. Some people you have a right to eat. Some you don't.

But, the claim that abortion is always murder depends a lot on the "at conception" belief, which as I said, I don't believe there is a non-religious rationale for. That doesn't make it bad. Like I said earlier, not every logically derived thing is good. Sometimes we need to override logic with other ways of thinking. In my view religion evolved and served a purpose, but it's unclear that we can supplant that purpose with something else and not destroy ourselves.

I think I'm getting more and more confused here.

Before I can try to address your counterpoints, I think I need to step back and ask exactly what your position is regarding laws based on the belief of life an conception. At first I thought you were saying that laws should only ever be based on what can be logically/rationally derived without making any reference to religion or religious concepts. But that now seems at odds with your statements that "...not every logically derived thing is good." and "...it's unclear that we can supplant that purpose [of religion] with something else and not destroy ourselves."

Based on those two quotes of yours, doesn't it then logically follow that sometimes society would need laws that are based on religious thinking, and not on secular rationality alone? I'm not even sure I would make such a claim, though...

 

[BugI02]

I mean....

Has PaulF been so soon forgotten?

 

[BugI02]

Would now be a bad time to ask how many here also support the death penalty while being very anti abortion? I need some help with that cognitive dissonance.

Death penalty:

Awarded to an adult or near adult human who has committed a crime or crimes so heinous as to cause society to conclude there is little possibility of rehabilitation, thus society opts for zero recidivism

Abortion:

A special case of undeserved death penalty awarded to an unborn human who is considered inconvenient but has committed no crimes nor been adjudicated irredeemable. Only the portion of society who exalts their own needs over any responsibility for their actions is supportive

 

[ljk]

GOP's do enjoy losing elections, and getting their abortion ban reversed. Win/win for the left in the long run.

Abortion and weed are the two traps the conservatives would fall without failure.

 

[BugI02]

Innocence and the Death Penalty

We currently represent people on death row with strong claims of innocence and support coalitions working to ban the death penalty.

innocenceproject.org

Sometimes even in a jury trial innocent people are still sent to death row. Under just that statistic alone should the death penalty not be abolished?

EVERY abortion results in an innocent person 'sent to death row'. By your avowed standard, should not ALL abortion be abolished?

 

[BugI02]

Now that’s a different question. First you try to say they’re inconsistent. Whe they show you they’re not, you say, well, sometimes the accused is innocent so you should abolish the death penalty. Where is the goal post here? Christians are poopy?

Bingo! We're 'literally killing them', or something

 

[KLB]

The government passes laws that set the parameters, as to what is allowable and what it not, so the decision is not left entirely up to the potential victim.

Why would someone that wants to die be a victim if they get their wish?

The government only controls when someone can legally be assisted in ending their life. The decision is still in the hands of the person wanting to die either way.

 

[LeftyGunner]

The more I think about it, the more ridiculous it is. The other side claims that all the Life-At-Conception folks have to offer are "tortured syllogisms stacked atop each other like turtles all the way down."

Meanwhile...

Life-At-Conception folks: "Every human life is a human person with human rights, plain and simple."

Life-At-Who-Knows-When folks: "It's a human life at conception, oh wait, I mean a life, but not a human life, definitely not a person, except some of us also say it's not a life at all, just a clump of cells, until at some poorly-defined point when it magically turns into a human life, which is kind-of-sort-of a human person and maybe has some rights, but not really, and then when it hits viability it gets more rights (maybe) but also in some cases it just has no rights at all right up until the moment of birth, depending on the crimes of the father, but also men have nothing to do with it and have no right to tell a woman anything about this maybe-human maybe-not human and any rights it may or may not have..."

There are other lines of thought than these. I argue that any rights to a fetus’ life belong entirely to its mother.

As a guest in another person’s body we have no right to take anything the other person is unwilling to give.

Our right to life does not give us the right to occupy and consume another person’s body unless that other person consents to it, and the other person is free to remove consent at any time for any reason.

This absolutely applies to gestation and live birth. A mother cannot guarantee -nor does she owe- her unborn a healthy gestation or a live birth…she alone chooses to sacrifice herself to do so…and only she can decide if the potential risks are worth the potential rewards.

Abortion is equal to an intentional miscarriage, and…just like how an unintended miscarriage is not manslaughter an intentional miscarriage is not murder.

 

[BugI02]

There is no rationale apart from a religious belief about conception, that would require me to start with that premise. I could argue that if we believed that overpopulation were a thing, abortion would benefit society.

I have heard plenty of women or couples announce that they're 'going to have a baby' but never have I heard an announcement that someone is 'going to have a foetus or an embryo'

People know it is a human being during its entire development. In the time honored traditions used to justify killing, the language used to talk about it is changed to allow for the denial of that humanity

There isn't as much daylight between 'Juden sind Untermenschen' and 'it's just a ball of cells' as you wish to imagine

 

[DoggyDaddy]

There are other lines of thought than these. I argue that any rights to a fetus’ life belong entirely to its mother.

As a guest in another person’s body we have no right to take anything the other person is unwilling to give.

Our right to life does not give us the right to occupy and consume another person’s body unless that other person consents to it, and the other person is free to remove consent at any time for any reason.

This absolutely applies to gestation and live birth. A mother cannot guarantee -nor does she owe- her unborn a healthy gestation or a live birth…she alone chooses to sacrifice herself to do so…and only she can decide if the potential risks are worth the potential rewards.

Abortion is equal to an intentional miscarriage, and…just like how an unintended miscarriage is not manslaughter an intentional miscarriage is not murder.

"Guest"? The fetus didn't just show up and "ask" to come in. The mother (and father) forced it to be there.

 

[AndreusMaximus]

There are other lines of thought than these. I argue that any rights to a fetus’ life belong entirely to its mother.

As a guest in another person’s body we have no right to take anything the other person is unwilling to give.

Our right to life does not give us the right to occupy and consume another person’s body unless that other person consents to it, and the other person is free to remove consent at any time for any reason.

This absolutely applies to gestation and live birth. A mother cannot guarantee -nor does she owe- her unborn a healthy gestation or a live birth…she alone chooses to sacrifice herself to do so…and only she can decide if the potential risks are worth the potential rewards.

Abortion is equal to an intentional miscarriage, and…just like how an unintended miscarriage is not manslaughter an intentional miscarriage is not murder.

Yes, I remember debating you position in great detail not too long ago. If you want my honest opinion, your position on abortion is actually more logically consistent than those who try to hem and haw around the issue by putting pre-born children in the fuzzy zone of sort-of-maybe being human but sort-of-maybe not, or trying to predicate their rights on things like viability, health conditions, or whether or not their father commit a crime when they were conceived, etc. But it is still flawed.

The scary thing about your position is that you view someone's right to life as being forfeit to someone whom they rely on. You try to claim that your position is merely about the mother being able to withdraw her consent for her child to use her body. But if it were merely that, then there would be some limits, such as giving her child a reasonable chance to exit her body once they can survive outside of it. But the fact that you say that she has the absolute right to kill, maim, or torture the life within her no matter what, means you see the child as not a person, but property of the mother. If this is applied with logical consistency, it opens the door to things like euthanasia for anyone whose caretakers, or society in general, decide they just cant be bothered to care for them anymore.

This is really a perfect illustration of my point. Taking the Life-at-Conception stance is not merely a religious idea. It is the position taken by anyone who understands the logical consequences of denying the right to life of an entire segment of humanity. Once the Pandora's box is open, and you start saying that innocent human beings lose their right to life under X, Y, or Z circumstances (or if you phrase it that X, Y, and Z human beings are not really persons and thus don't have a right to life to being with, makes no difference) then you have lost anything that can be logically used as a truly consistent basis for morality, without also opening the door to atrocities. If a mother has the right to take her child's life because that child relies on her body, then once the child is born, and is still dependent on society at large to survive, then you will grant society at large the authority to take the child's life, if you are being consistent.

 

[LeftyGunner]

"Guest"? The fetus didn't just show up and "ask" to come in. The mother (and father) forced it to be there.

Sex doesn’t force pregnancy…it invites it.

Invitation is another word for consent...both can be revoked at will.

Free access to abortion means every child
that gets born is wanted by its mother. That might not seem like much, but the ugly truth is that there is a statistically significant reverse correlation between the availability of abortion and violent crime rates in urbanized societies...unwanted kids become criminals at significantly higher rates than kids from loving homes.

 

[DoggyDaddy]

Invitation is another word for consent.

Whose consent? Certainly not the consent of the child.

 

[BE Mike]

Why would someone that wants to die be a victim if they get their wish?

The government only controls when someone can legally be assisted in ending their life. The decision is still in the hands of the person wanting to die either way.

We can be the victims of our own devices.

 

[LeftyGunner]

Whose consent? Certainly not the consent of the child.

Children are incapable of consent…even lawyers know that.

It is a mother’s duty to assess and consent to risk on their child’s behalf…whether it has been born yet or not.

 

[DoggyDaddy]

Children are incapable of consent…even lawyers know that.

It is a mother’s duty to assess and consent to risk on their child’s behalf…whether it has been born yet or not.

If the child is incapable of granting consent, then how can the mother give consent to the child? Are they not incapable of accepting consent as well?

 

[BugI02]

Yeah, mother granted the absolute power of life and death over her child seems more like the divine right of kings than any sort of logically consistent morality

 

[LeftyGunner]

If the child is incapable of granting consent, then how can the mother give consent to the child? Are they not incapable of accepting consent as well?

I don’t understand the question.

A child cannot consent to anything, not even to accepting a peanut-butter sandwich on its own. A parent must assess the risk and act on behalf of the child…hopefully in that child’s best interests, but that’s hardly a given in this world.

 

[LeftyGunner]

Yeah, mother granted the absolute power of life and death over her child seems more like the divine right of kings than any sort of logically consistent morality

Every mother has absolute power of life and death over her unborn…or have you forgotten that suicide exists?

 

[DoggyDaddy]

I don’t understand the question.

A child cannot consent to anything, not even to accepting a peanut-butter sandwich on its own. A parent must assess the risk and act on behalf of the child…hopefully in that child’s best interests, but that’s hardly a given in this world.

So when, assuming the child would be healthy and viable at birth, is it in the child's best interest to kill it?