Aborting children with genetic defects

[Moonbeam]

Originally posted by: Donny Baker

Originally posted by: Mursilis

Originally posted by: ECUHITMAN
The overall point of this debate is not about weather you agree or disagree with genetic testing and abortion is about choice. Do you think that the government should be able to take away people's choice?

No, the overall point (really, central issue) of this debate is whether, and at what point, the fetus is another person with rights worthy of protection. After all, every day the government "takes away people's choice" to kill, rape, and steal, and no sane person complains about that. Law is little more than the elimination of choices, and the nation literally has hundreds of thousands of laws.

I consider myself essentially libertarian, and the only reason I oppose abortion, and the legalization of abortion, is because it harms a 3rd party, and the state has every right to protect citizens against harm by others. In contrast, I have never chosen to use recreational drugs, but I support the legalization of drug use because it affects only the user. While it may or may not be harmful (I think it is), as long as any harm is restricted to the user, such is the user's choice, and it is not my business to prohibit another person's choices which affect only themselves. While you may not agree with assigning rights to a fetus as I do, hopefully you can agree that if you accept the premise, the conclusion logically follows. After all, I've never seen anyone protest outside a liposuction clinic, despite the fact the number of cells being vacuumed out of the body via liposuction is frequently higher than the number of cells being vacuumed out via abortion.

So as a libertarian, you support letting the government have more control over something growing INSIDE of you than you yourself?

Yup, another absolutist whose absolute is about the child and not the mother. It's just a refusal to deal with complexities, possibly due to lack of capacity.

 

[Mursilis]

Originally posted by: Donny Baker
So as a libertarian, you support letting the government have more control over something growing INSIDE of you than you yourself?

Rights in personal property, including one's body, are near sacred to me, but they aren't absolute. You may be able to do something morally objectionable (to some) like watch porn in your living room because it's your living room and the harm (assuming there is any at all) in watching porn would be confined to yourself, but the same logic doesn't apply to, say, shooting someone in your living room. The body's the same way. Every year, thieves are caught trying to steal valuables by swallowing them, but placing someone else's ring in my digestive tract does nothing to make it any more my property that it ever was (which it wasn't). The fetus having a right to the integrity of its own body, I have no problem with a legal prohibition on the destruction of that body by another. It's sometimes unfortunate that this is how humans reproduce, but certainly none of us had a say in this design.

 

[Mursilis]

Originally posted by: Moonbeam
Yup, another absolutist whose absolute is about the child and not the mother. It's just a refusal to deal with complexities, possibly due to lack of capacity.

Moonbeam, I think I've shown you more courtesy than to deserve such an insult. If I haven't, then my apologies.

Second, on most moral issues, I do tend toward absolutes (I blame exposure to Kant during my college years); this much is true. However, I also acknowledge complexities, such that one absolute may trump another. It may be wrong to shove old ladies, but if one is shoving an old lady out of the path of a bus, it may be right, no? That is, one absolute (not to physically harm another) may be trumped by a higher absolute (preventing the death of another). However, when it comes to the absolute of not taking the life of another (which is why I don't support the death penalty, a position shared by many much to my left politically), regarding abortion, I have yet to hear articulated a higher absolute.

 

[Moonbeam]

Originally posted by: Mursilis

Originally posted by: Donny Baker
So as a libertarian, you support letting the government have more control over something growing INSIDE of you than you yourself?

Rights in personal property, including one's body, are near sacred to me, but they aren't absolute. You may be able to do something morally objectionable (to some) like watch porn in your living room because it's your living room and the harm (assuming there is any at all) in watching porn would be confined to yourself, but the same logic doesn't apply to, say, shooting someone in your living room. The body's the same way. Every year, thieves are caught trying to steal valuables by swallowing them, but placing someone else's ring in my digestive tract does nothing to make it any more my property that it ever was (which it wasn't). The fetus having a right to the integrity of its own body, I have no problem with a legal prohibition on the destruction of that body by another. It's sometimes unfortunate that this is how humans reproduce, but certainly none of us had a say in this design.

Are you going to grant rights to tumors too? We have no say in our design and that is why to take our say with the technique of abortion. We do not have to be slaves to design. That's is what our evolutionary advantages are all about. We adapt to situations. Your argument is fixated on the sacredness of life and it colors everything you see. It would be criminal, however, to force all women to have every child conceived. Accommodation is required when absolutes collide.

 

[Moonbeam]

Originally posted by: Mursilis

Originally posted by: Moonbeam
Yup, another absolutist whose absolute is about the child and not the mother. It's just a refusal to deal with complexities, possibly due to lack of capacity.

Moonbeam, I think I've shown you more courtesy than to deserve such an insult. If I haven't, then my apologies.

Second, on most moral issues, I do tend toward absolutes (I blame exposure to Kant during my college years); this much is true. However, I also acknowledge complexities, such that one absolute may trump another. It may be wrong to shove old ladies, but if one is shoving an old lady out of the path of a bus, it may be right, no? That is, one absolute (not to physically harm another) may be trumped by a higher absolute (preventing the death of another). However, when it comes to the absolute of not taking the life of another (which is why I don't support the death penalty, a position shared by many much to my left politically), regarding abortion, I have yet to hear articulated a higher absolute.

Well I did say possibly, but sorry.

There can be no higher or lower absolute owing to the absoluteness thingi.

The whole point is that absolutes are only absolute when they don't conflict. How you may visualize them in your head is not how they can be applied. We have brains and have to find balance in issues.

 

[Mean MrMustard]

Originally posted by: Mursilis

Originally posted by: Donny Baker
So as a libertarian, you support letting the government have more control over something growing INSIDE of you than you yourself?

Rights in personal property, including one's body, are near sacred to me, but they aren't absolute. You may be able to do something morally objectionable (to some) like watch porn in your living room because it's your living room and the harm (assuming there is any at all) in watching porn would be confined to yourself, but the same logic doesn't apply to, say, shooting someone in your living room. The body's the same way. Every year, thieves are caught trying to steal valuables by swallowing them, but placing someone else's ring in my digestive tract does nothing to make it any more my property that it ever was (which it wasn't).

Thieves swallowing valuables is not a good analogy. The thieves having taken the valuables is the first violation. At that point it's stolen property and in violation of the law long before it's inside their body.

The fetus having a right to the integrity of its own body, I have no problem with a legal prohibition on the destruction of that body by another. It's sometimes unfortunate that this is how humans reproduce, but certainly none of us had a say in this design.

And the mother having a right to the integrity of her own body. The mother is the host body. The fetus is the dependent body. The rights of the host transcend the dependent's. A host should not be dictated to by the dependent much less a third party (gov't).

 

[Mursilis]

Originally posted by: Moonbeam
Are you going to grant rights to tumors too?

Even with all nutrients available and the best possible environment, a tumor will never be a human; thus, it is dissimilar to a fetus.

We have no say in our design and that is why to take our say with the technique of abortion. We do not have to be slaves to design.

Of course we do - can you fly? Can you breathe underwater? Can you reproduce asexually? Of course we can overcome design via technology, to a certain extent, but technology is amoral - neither good nor bad in and of itself. The same science which has given us life-saving medicine has also brought us nuclear weapons. That we can abort children says nothing about whether we should.

That's is what our evolutionary advantages are all about. We adapt to situations. Your argument is fixated on the sacredness of life and it colors everything you see.

Maybe, but isn't that great for you? Would you prefer enemies who considered your life sacred, or those that did not? Everyone should grant to others the respect for life they themselves expect to receive regarding their own life.

It would be criminal, however, to force all women to have every child conceived. Accommodation is required when absolutes collide.

Abolitionists offered no accommodation to slaveholders, nor should they have.

 

[Mursilis]

Originally posted by: Donny Baker
And the mother having a right to the integrity of her own body. The mother is the host body. The fetus is the dependent body. The rights of the host transcend the dependent's. A host should not be dictated to by the dependent much less a third party (gov't).

This point has already been discussed above, but . . .
That might be true if the child had a say in its creation, but it doesn't, and the mother does.

And really, isn't a newborn still just as dependent? Yet we allow it to dictate to the hosts (parents) all the time.

 

[Moonbeam]

Mo: Are you going to grant rights to tumors too?

Mu: Even with all nutrients available and the best possible environment, a tumor will never be a human; thus, it is dissimilar to a fetus.

MO: What is the difference that is not a difference of imagination, a something you impute to the fetus our of your head?

Say an alien race arrives on earth to breed and they do by paractizing human beings. They want to stay for thousands of years and use our bodies to raise their brood and this is the way evolution or God made them. Do they have a right to lay an egg in you to preserve their species?
------------------
Mo: We have no say in our design and that is why to take our say with the technique of abortion. We do not have to be slaves to design. (Not worded right but never mind)

Mu: Of course we do - can you fly? Can you breathe underwater? Can you reproduce asexually? Of course we can overcome design via technology, to a certain extent, but technology is amoral - neither good nor bad in and of itself. The same science which has given us life-saving medicine has also brought us nuclear weapons. That we can abort children says nothing about whether we should.

Mo: But that IS my point. It's all about judgment of good and evil and being imprisoned by absolutes.
--------------
Mo: That's is what our evolutionary advantages are all about. We adapt to situations. Your argument is fixated on the sacredness of life and it colors everything you see.

Mu: Maybe, but isn't that great for you? Would you prefer enemies who considered your life sacred, or those that did not? Everyone should grant to others the respect for life they themselves expect to receive regarding their own life.

Mo: I would prefer not to have enemies or people so commited to some absolute they become irrational. The argument is about life, when it begins, and when and how it interscects with other life as the life of the mother.
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[Mo: It would be criminal, however, to force all women to have every child conceived. Accommodation is required when absolutes collide.

Mu: Abolitionists offered no accommodation to slaveholders, nor should they have.

Mo: Yes but where was the clash of absolutes and they were accommodated for years and years even in the Constitution.

Abortion is legal because wise men in an impossible situation determined to do something that made the most sense for real here and now women as opposed to their figmentary kids.

 

[Mursilis]

Originally posted by: Moonbeam

Mu: Abolitionists offered no accommodation to slaveholders, nor should they have.

Mo: Yes but where was the clash of absolutes and they were accommodated for years and years even in the Constitution.

Yes, but can't we agree such accommodation was WRONG!?!? Blacks should never have had to wait those many years for basic human rights!! One absolute (the end of slavery) should have prevailed long before it did, and no that that absolute (human beings may not be bought and sold) governs, I see no one complaining (racist nutcases aside).

Abortion is legal because wise men in an impossible situation determined to do something that made the most sense for real here and now women as opposed to their figmentary kids.

Sorry, but the kids are as here and now as the women (otherwise, why do they have to be aborted? Because they exist!). I know you see it differently, but we're just going to have to agree to disagree, I suppose. Few people change their mind on this one, but I am one (fervently pro-choice for much of my life). Others may follow; who knows? Anyway, for now, other obligations beckon!!

 

[Moonbeam]

Originally posted by: Mursilis

Originally posted by: Moonbeam

Mu: Abolitionists offered no accommodation to slaveholders, nor should they have.

Mo: Yes but where was the clash of absolutes and they were accommodated for years and years even in the Constitution.

Yes, but can't we agree such accommodation was WRONG!?!? Blacks should never have had to wait those many years for basic human rights!! One absolute (the end of slavery) should have prevailed long before it did, and no that that absolute (human beings may not be bought and sold) governs, I see no one complaining (racist nutcases aside).

Abortion is legal because wise men in an impossible situation determined to do something that made the most sense for real here and now women as opposed to their figmentary kids.

Sorry, but the kids are as here and now as the women (otherwise, why do they have to be aborted? Because they exist!). I know you see it differently, but we're just going to have to agree to disagree, I suppose. Few people change their mind on this one, but I am one (fervently pro-choice for much of my life). Others may follow; who knows? Anyway, for now, other obligations beckon!!

Disagreement does not concern me. My purpose is to expose the violence you prefer to do to women in the name of a child that does not yet exist as the child you imagine you are protecting. You are infatuated with the imaginary over the real. Your path leads to the death of women in with coat hangers and thousands of unwanted children and increased crime and social welfare. You represent, in my opinion, a danger to society, because you cannot flex and your convictions are of the type you want to put into law.

 

[straightalker]

Mankind's inhumanity to mankind is often apalling. Enough to make you sick enough to throw up. Those of you advocating "freedom of choice" with regards to abortion have definitely just never took the time to thoroughly examine what it is you are actually doing.

The websites i could show here if this were not impossible due to their graphic nature, would make any sensible person barf. Just describing it is horrid. I'll try to be as basic as possible without being graphic...

...in the operating room is a trashcan on wheels labeled something like 'bio-hazzard waste depository". I've seen what got tossed in there. Like i say. It's all online but it's your choice to go look on your own. Prepare yourself, because it is so tremendously sad, it is like feeling a sapping drain of energy out of you that brings you to such grief it is indescribable.

How a couple thinking of having children can sit there oblivious to what it totally means to abort a child by geneticly sorting it out as not worthy to live if it has some gene that makes the child possibly get sick is beyond my comprehension. Nuff said. Point made.

The news video that this thread is based on was on Yahoo daily News but it was impossible to link to because those links shift around on a daily basis. It was dated i think tuesday or wenesday.

 

[Mursilis]

Originally posted by: Moonbeam
Disagreement does not concern me. My purpose is to expose the violence you prefer to do to women in the name of a child that does not yet exist as the child you imagine you are protecting. You are infatuated with the imaginary over the real. Your path leads to the death of women in with coat hangers and thousands of unwanted children and increased crime and social welfare.

I do not "prefer" violence; I wish to extinguish it. And if a child is not real, why does it need to be aborted?

You represent, in my opinion, a danger to society, because you cannot flex and your convictions are of the type you want to put into law.

You confuse cannot and will not. And how many people here will not flex on the idea that the Iraqi war is wrong? Have you complained about their intransigency, or do you consider it admirable?

 

[blackllotus]

Originally posted by: Mursilis
Even with all nutrients available and the best possible environment, a tumor will never be a human; thus, it is dissimilar to a fetus.

But "turning into" and "being equivalent to" are totally different things. I'll take someone elses example in this thread of an acorn and a tree. Last time I checked I get fined for cutting down a tree, but not for crushing an acorn. Even if the acorn is planted I'm sure it has to grow to a minimum height before being considered a tree. The same sort of logic applies to fetuses and humans.

 

[Moonbeam]

Originally posted by: Mursilis

Originally posted by: Moonbeam
Disagreement does not concern me. My purpose is to expose the violence you prefer to do to women in the name of a child that does not yet exist as the child you imagine you are protecting. You are infatuated with the imaginary over the real. Your path leads to the death of women in with coat hangers and thousands of unwanted children and increased crime and social welfare.

I do not "prefer" violence; I wish to extinguish it. And if a child is not real, why does it need to be aborted?

You represent, in my opinion, a danger to society, because you cannot flex and your convictions are of the type you want to put into law.

You confuse cannot and will not. And how many people here will not flex on the idea that the Iraqi war is wrong? Have you complained about their intransigency, or do you consider it admirable?

A can not that is a will not is a can not. I believe that to continue or end the war in Iraq will either be a disaster.

 

[Meuge]

Ahh, the good ole' "it's gross, therefore it's wrong" argument. Hmm, I guess we should outlaw hip replacement too. Surely, a large number of cells die from the procedure... and it's gross - so it meets all the retards' requirements for being outlawed. Now, if only a minister said it, we'd be all set.

 

[XZeroII]

Originally posted by: jackschmittusa
The unborn are not people, and should not be awarded similar rights. And "used to be" depends on where and when you are talking about. Many cultures simply discarded defective newborns in the past. Your slippery slope argument is poor as well since living persons have far more protections than fetuses do.

I say that your argument doesn't go far enough. Women, blacks and non-Americans are not people either and should not be awarded similar rights either. I say that only White Males who own property should have any rights at all. The rest can be killed at will. Who's with me?!