Mothers day and abortion

[mindmajick]

Is there anyone here who thinks it's not OK to "murder fetuses", but thinks capital punishment is OK? Or war? Or killing muslims?

I have yet to meet someone who pushes "pro-life" who doesn't want to murder some group. Yeah, I'm "pro-life", but that's on me and not the legal establishment as stated previously.

 

[tynopik]

you were the one who started arguing legal semantics and posting legal findings that invalidated your own argument.

The thread of the argument was that it didn't matter if they were a person, a woman's right to self-defense trumped the fetus's right to live.

I showed that this was incorrect. If the fetus is a person, then self-defense would not be a valid legal excuse for abortion.

the law comes down on the side of the woman.

Because the law does not regard the fetus as a person. If the law changed and recognized a fetus as a person, then the fetus's right to live would trump the woman's right to sovereignty because proportionally the harm being suffered by the woman does not justify killing someone.

 

[fskimospy]

I addressed it, you just didn't like my answer.

My response to these 'trolley' quesions is always that they're illogical. This isn't some new position of mine. A few years back someone here posted a link to series of questions for a research project. They had questions along the lines of "You're in a boat and one injured person is hanging on and you see 2 people drowning further away. You know that if you don't knock the guy off, you won't reach the 2 drowning people in time, but if you do knock the guy off, he'll drown instead."

I refused to answer them and instead wrote in the comments section below each question explaining the multitude of ways their questions were nonsensical. I eventually gave up when when one of the questions complained that my comment was too long.

I don't think you're using the word 'illogical' correctly. The question is perfectly logical and can be answered very simply.

You don't want to answer it because once you do your position is no longer defensible.

 

[Atreus21]

I addressed it, you just didn't like my answer.

My response to these 'trolley' quesions is always that they're illogical. This isn't some new position of mine. A few years back someone here posted a link to series of questions for a research project. They had questions along the lines of "You're in a boat and one injured person is hanging on and you see 2 people drowning further away. You know that if you don't knock the guy off, you won't reach the 2 drowning people in time, but if you do knock the guy off, he'll drown instead."

I refused to answer them and instead wrote in the comments section below each question explaining the multitude of ways their questions were nonsensical. I eventually gave up when when one of the questions complained that my comment was too long.

The problem with them is that they can be tailored to lead an honest answerer to any preordained conclusion.

 

[fskimospy]

My argument is that this scenario doesn't prove anything about a right to life, or lack of it. It forces us to kill someone, in which case a right to life is irrelevant.

It clearly does, as you have chosen one person's right to life over that of a thousand other people's rights to life. If they were equal you wouldn't do that.

No, I'm willing to kill a thousand embryos on rational grounds so that a born child doesn't die a painful agonizing death. If the choice were between a thousand embryos on one side and a dying invalid on the other, I'd save the embryos. If the choice were between a thousand Justin Biebers and one Carrot Top, I'd save Carrot Top.

So in other words you view a person's right to be free of pain to exceed the right to life of a thousand people you claim to hold equally valuable. How does that make any sense given your statement that the right to life is the single, most basic right?

Let's just say that I sincerely doubt that if you had the choice of having one baby die in a fire or the option to euthanize a thousand babies painlessly that you would choose the thousand euthanized babies.

I could change the scenario only slightly and reasonably justify the saving of those embryos. But whatever my choice is, it has nothing whatsoever to do with the right to life of the parties involved.

Again, it clearly does.

Exactly.

For a million other adults, I agree. For a million embryos who can neither suffer nor understand what's been done to them, I can understand that choice.

In either case, that doesn't mean either group lacked a right to life.

It clearly means you didn't hold those two rights to be equal, which is again the whole point.

There's really no escaping this.

 

[fskimospy]

The problem with them is that they can be tailored to lead an honest answerer to any preordained conclusion.

The problem is it leads you to a conclusion that you don't want to have to deal with.

It's a very simple question: it simply asks you to make a choice between 1,000 "lives" of embryos and one life of a baby. Feel free to tailor that in literally any way you want which does not alter that fundamental question.

 

[tynopik]

You mean the one who was still receiving blood, oxygen, food and water through an umbilical cord attached to a placenta while physically immersed in amniotic fluid in the womb versus the one that was breathing on its own with no more physical bond to the mother? You don't think I could find any experts to say that those two are fundamentally different? Do you even science?

Its environment has changed and how it receives nutrients has changed, but the baby itself has not fundamentally changed.

If someone receives nutrients through an IV instead of through their stomach, that doesn't change who they are.

 

[Blackjack200]

The problem is it leads you to a conclusion that you don't want to have to deal with.

It's a very simple question: it simply asks you to make a choice between 1,000 "lives" of embryos and one life of a baby. Feel free to tailor that in literally any way you want which does not alter that fundamental question.

You don't even need a hypothetical:

Because of their plasticity and potentially unlimited capacity for self-renewal, Embryonic stem cell therapies have been proposed for regenerative medicine and tissue replacement after injury or disease. Diseases that could potentially be treated by pluripotent stem cells include a number of blood and immune-system related genetic diseases, cancers, and disorders; juvenile diabetes; Parkinson's; blindness and spinal cord injuries. Besides the ethical concerns of stem cell therapy (see stem cell controversy), there is a technical problem of graft-versus-host disease associated with allogeneic stem cell transplantation. However, these problems associated with histocompatibility may be solved using autologous donor adult stem cells, therapeutic cloning. The therapeutic cloning done by a method called somatic cell nuclear transfer (SCNT) may be advantageous against mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA) mutated diseases.[7] Stem cell banks or more recently by reprogramming of somatic cells with defined factors (e.g. induced pluripotent stem cells). Embryonic stem cells provide hope that it will be possible to overcome the problems of donor tissue shortage and also, by making the cells immunocompatible with the recipient. Other potential uses of embryonic stem cells include investigation of early human development, study of genetic disease and as in vitro systems for toxicology testing.

Pro lifers care more about embryos than people with blood and immune system genetic diseases.

 

[Atreus21]

It does not.

...Yes it does. We have to choose who will die in your thought experiment.

So in other words you view a person's right to be free of pain to exceed the right to life of a thousand people you claim to hold equally valuable. How does that make any sense given your statement that the right to life is the single, most basic right?

The simple problem in your scenario is that someone has to die, and our only choice is who. What sense does a right to life make in that context? The condition of the whole experiment is that someone's rights must necessarily be violated. The question is thus not who has a right to life, but who ought to suffer the least.

Let's just say that I sincerely doubt that if you had the choice of having one baby die in a fire or the option to euthanize a thousand babies painlessly that you would choose the thousand euthanized babies.

Well, here we go again. In that case, I'd let the single child die in a fire. Because 1000 children who happen to be anesthetized are a greater loss than a single child who is not. And once again, that doesn't mean the single child didn't have a right to life.

Again, it clearly does.

As you admitted earlier in the friend and stranger scenario, it doesn't.

It clearly means you didn't hold those two rights to be equal, which is again the whole point.

There's really no escaping this.

Interesting, because I was about to make a similar observation about the lack of escape.

Of course the two rights aren't equal when forced to choose who will lose their rights. That doesn't mean one has rights and the other doesn't.

 

[Atomic Playboy]

Its environment has changed and how it receives nutrients has changed, but the baby itself has not fundamentally changed.

If someone receives nutrients through an IV instead of through their stomach, that doesn't change who they are.

It has fundamentally changed. The instant that blood stops flowing through the umbilical cord, there are shunts in the heart that permanently close so the heart can begin pumping blood through the body in a closed system. Once that happens, you can't reattach the umbilical cord and continue pumping blood through it; the body has physically changed. The lungs start working. The bowels and bladder start working. That's slightly different than someone whose organs are going into failure.

And, lest we forget, you're talking about a fetus moments before it is born; that's hardly the same thing as an embryo in the first weeks following conception. Using an image of a viable fetus that is just about to be born as an argument against abortion is like using an image of a child as an argument against the death penalty; that's not really who it's being used on. I think most people would agree that a viable fetus that can survive outside the womb should not be aborted; if you've taken it that far, get it out and put it up for adoption. It's disingenuous to conflate a 38 week old fetus and a 4 week old embryo that's the size of the period at the end of this sentence.

 

[tynopik]

The life of that particular individual starts at conception.

Moving the goal posts. Typical disingenuous bullshit.

How so? If the argument is whether abortion is killing someone, then when that person's life begins is very relevant to the discussion.

 

[fskimospy]

...Yes it does. We have to choose who will die in your thought experiment.

The simple problem in your scenario is that someone has to die, and our only choice is who. What sense does a right to life make in that context? The condition of the whole experiment is that someone's rights must necessarily be violated. The question is thus not who has a right to life, but who ought to suffer the least.

That's literally the entire point of the thought experiment, to discern what right to life you deem to be more valuable. You are now arguing that making sure a baby does not suffer is more important than the right to life of 999 additional people.

Well, here we go again. In that case, I'd let the single child die in a fire. Because 1000 children who happen to be anesthetized are a greater loss than a single child who is not. And once again, that doesn't mean the single child didn't have a right to life.

Great! This literally answers everything and proves beyond a doubt that you do not value the right to life of an embryo equally as to the right to life of a baby. You previously argued that the suffering of the baby was enough to overwhelm the right to life of 1,000 embryos, but now admit that it is not enough to overwhelm the right to life of 1,000 babies. The inescapable conclusion is that they are not equal.

That's game, set, and match.

As you admitted earlier in the friend and stranger scenario, it doesn't.

That isn't true at all, I said that when confronted with two people I consider to have an equal right to life I would choose on other factors. If I were to choose between 1 person and 1,000 people that I considered to have an equal right to life I wouldn't need to. It actually just further proves my position.

Interesting, because I was about to make a similar observation about the lack of escape.

Of course the two rights aren't equal when forced to choose who will lose their rights. That doesn't mean one has rights and the other doesn't.

It does mean that we don't view those rights as equal though, which is the crux of the argument. An embryo does not have a right to life equal to a baby, as you've already admitted. It's long since time people stopped pretending that it does.

 

[tynopik]

It has fundamentally changed. The instant that blood stops flowing through the umbilical cord, there are shunts in the heart that permanently close so the heart can begin pumping blood through the body in a closed system. Once that happens, you can't reattach the umbilical cord and continue pumping blood through it; the body has physically changed.

When you amputate a limb the body has physically changed, but it is still fundamentally the same person.

Also the umbilical cord is usually detached after birth, so unless you're saying you can kill babies as long as you haven't cut the cord . . .

The lungs start working.

But they were already there, fully formed.

The bowels and bladder start working.

Somewhat disturbingly, those actually work before birth.

 

[Paratus]

Someone who's brain dead will never recover.

A more apt comparison would be someone in a coma.



The life of that particular individual starts at conception.

The egg and sperm before conception are just cells of a larger person. If they are destroyed, the individuals live on



I would argue it's an actual human




Everyone has a 100% chance of dying. That doesn't gives us the right to kill them.

You do realize that a person is an individual? A fertilized egg may become no one, or it may become and individual or twins, triplets, etc.

So while a fertilized egg maybe human and you may argue it is "a human", humans are individuals and have brains, hearts and other organs. Fertilized eggs do not.

Although if we follow your thought experiment of calling a fertilized egg a human and assigning all rights at the time of conception some interesting things occur.

First of which would be Eskimospys thought experiment. You'd be morally obligated to save the embryos and not the baby.

Second, mentioned in this research, 2/3 of embryos fail to reach maturity. http://med.stanford.edu/news/all-ne...n-of-embryo-survival-enabled-by-research.html. (This research was published in Nature a well known peer reviewed journal. I know how important that is to you. )

By arbitrarily dictating that a fertilized egg is a person you will turn the act of procreation into the mass murder of innocent "babies" on a scale that will dwarf abortion by orders of magnitude. On average every live birth will occur after one or more failed embryos die.

You can argue that everyone dies, but there is no legal or moral precedent to allow someone to have children only to allow 2/3 of them to die. Not when the other option is to simply not have sexual relations for procreation.

So congratulations continuation of the human race is either immoral or built on a pile of dead "babies".

This is why no one actually believes a fertilized egg is a person, even if they say they do.

 

[tynopik]

I think most people would agree that a viable fetus that can survive outside the womb should not be aborted

Why would it be wrong to kill a viable fetus?

This is the major cognitive dissonance abortion proponents face. Where do you draw the line and why?

Viability is a slippery thing. Medical science is ever progressing and are we saying that whether we grant someone human rights depends on how well we can keep them alive outside the womb? If they are human outside the womb then they are human inside the womb.

 

[tynopik]

By arbitrarily dictating that a fertilized egg is a person you will turn the act of procreation into the mass murder of innocent "babies" on a scale that will dwarf abortion by orders of magnitude.

Are you intentionally killing them? Then it's not murder.

You can argue that everyone dies, but there is no legal or moral precedent to allow someone to have children only to allow 2/3 of them to die.

I'm not sure what you're trying to say.

So congratulations continuation of the human race is either immoral or built on a pile of dead "babies".

Civilization is built on a lot of dead people, *shrug*

Again, everyone dies. Some die in the womb, some die as children, some die at a ripe old age. We do the best we can to help everyone we can, but there is nothing immoral about giving someone their 'shot'.

 

[Atomic Playboy]

Why would it be wrong to kill a viable fetus?

This is the major cognitive dissonance abortion proponents face. Where do you draw the line and why?

Viability is a slippery thing. Medical science is ever progressing and are we saying that whether we grant someone human rights depends on how well we can keep them alive outside the womb? If they are human outside the womb then they are human inside the womb.

That's why I'm pro-choice; I don't believe I'm qualified to make that decision for other people. I think it would be pretty arrogant for me to claim that I had the definitive answer to when abortion was acceptable and when it was unacceptable and no other interpretation could possibly be correct. That's not cognitive dissonance, it's believing that the choice is personal and needs to be up to the person making it. You're the one trying to limit rights based on your very specific (and not supported by the scientific community) idea on when life begins.

 

[Atreus21]

That's literally the entire point of the thought experiment, to discern what right to life you deem to be more valuable.

Yes, more valuable. Not valuable intrinsically. Me telling you that I'd let 3 dying people die to save a single healthy adult doesn't mean I didn't think those dying people had rights that I was forced to violate.

Great! This literally answers everything and proves beyond a doubt that you do not value the right to life of an embryo equally as to the right to life of a baby. You previously argued that the suffering of the baby was enough to overwhelm the right to life of 1,000 embryos, but now admit that it is not enough to overwhelm the right to life of 1,000 babies. The inescapable conclusion is that they are not equal.

That's game, set, and match.

...The inescapable conclusion is exactly what I said from the outset: That being forced to choose who will die means rights to life become irrelevant because the situation is contingent on violating them.

It does mean that we don't view those rights as equal though, which is the crux of the argument. An embryo does not have a right to life equal to a baby, as you've already admitted. It's long since time people stopped pretending that it does.

Agreed. An embryo doesn't have a right to life equal to a baby. In order of priority of human rights to life, an embryo is lowest.

But it still has the right to life, and we shouldn't be allowed to violate it without good reason.

 

[tynopik]

That's why I'm pro-choice; I don't believe I'm qualified to make that decision for other people.

One of the most basic duties of the state is to protect those who cannot protect themselves. Saying "well, we're not sure who deserves protection, so none of them do" is a massive abdication of responsibility.

In fact the better response would be, "We're not sure who deserves protection, so we're going to protect them all, just to be safe."

When the EPA sets safety standards for pollutants, they don't quibble about where exactly the safe line is, they set the limit to 1/100 of what has been determined to be safe. Just to be sure.

it's believing that the choice is personal

When 2 people are involved, it's no longer a personal choice.

You're the one trying to limit rights based on your very specific (and not supported by the scientific community) idea on when life begins.

I'm the one trying to protect the most fundamental right of all.

 

[Cerpin Taxt]

My response to these 'trolley' quesions is always that they're illogical.

Which rule of logic do they violate, according to you?

This isn't some new position of mine. A few years back someone here posted a link to series of questions for a research project. They had questions along the lines of "You're in a boat and one injured person is hanging on and you see 2 people drowning further away. You know that if you don't knock the guy off, you won't reach the 2 drowning people in time, but if you do knock the guy off, he'll drown instead."

I refused to answer them and instead wrote in the comments section below each question explaining the multitude of ways their questions were nonsensical. I eventually gave up when when one of the questions complained that my comment was too long.

I'm interested in how you think those questions are "nonsensical." I don't think you know what "nonsensical" means.

 

[Atomic Playboy]

One of the most basic duties of the state is to protect those who cannot protect themselves. Saying "well, we're not sure who deserves protection, so none of them do" is a massive abdication of responsibility.

In fact the better response would be, "We're not sure who deserves protection, so we're going to protect them all, just to be safe."

So if a mother gives birth to a baby that has no brain activity, is she allowed to make the decision to pull the plug, or should it be required that the infant be kept on life support indefinitely until it eventually succumbs to fate?

 

[tynopik]

Go start a separate Trolley thread if you want, i'm not going to 'derail' (haha) the discussions further here.

 

[tynopik]

So if a mother gives birth to a baby that has no brain activity, is she allowed to make the decision to pull the plug, or should it be required that the infant be kept on life support indefinitely until it eventually succumbs to fate?

The court has ruled repeatedly that brain death = death

 

[Cerpin Taxt]

And you completely ignore the second part of the quote.

It isn't relevant, dummy.

 

[Atomic Playboy]

The court has ruled repeatedly that brain death = death

So the mother has the ability to say "my baby has no brain activity, therefore it is dead," yes? So you'd be fine with abortions before a fetus has brain activity, correct? After all, a lack of brain activity is a lack of life.