Abortion: can a mother hurt the embryo?

[Sheldon]

When you don't have a leg to stand on...

create a new leg.

Still playing the man not the ball I see. Care to venture anything on the topic, it has been a while.

 

[Kenny]

Still playing the man not the ball I see. Care to venture anything on the topic, it has been a while.

When you flood a topic with innumerable posts and many don't even have to do with what is talked about... it is hard to have a intelligent conversation.

 

[Subduction Zone]

Actually it is the other way around.

You are not fooling anybody.

It is a reasonable question to ask you why you cannot use proper terminology.

 

[Subduction Zone]

When you flood a topic with innumerable posts and many don't even have to do with what is talked about... it is hard to have a intelligent conversation.

Dang it! I just bought that ironimeter.

 

[Subduction Zone]

Still, the point holds. A person is a person.

True. And a fetus, embryo, or blastosphere is not a person.

 

[Kenny]

You are not fooling anybody.

It is a reasonable question to ask you why you cannot use proper terminology.

It is right to use proper terminology. When you are a doctor, use latin. When you are an everyday person, we call it "baby". Calling a baby "fetus" doesn't change the reality that it is still a baby but it does impersonalize it for your benefit.

 

[Subduction Zone]

It is right to use proper terminology. When you are a doctor, use latin. When you are an everyday person, we call it "baby". Calling a baby "fetus" doesn't change the reality that it is still a baby but it does impersonalize it for your benefit.

Nope. Not when the topic is limited to pregnancy. You are making an unjustified assumption when you use that term. It is also a tacit admission that you do not have a rational argument when you refuse to use proper terminology.

 

[Sheldon]

When you flood a topic with innumerable posts and many don't even have to do with what is talked about... it is hard to have a intelligent conversation.

My post was on topic, I asked you to justify your claim that @Subduction Zone had ignored context, citing the fact that you offered no explanation of why his post about the definitions of blastocysts and foetuses as opposed to babies children and infants is off topic exactly. You have responded with a flurry of ad hominem attacks?

You have yet to address the fact that a blastocyst or foetus is topologically connected to the woman whose body it is using, deriving all it's oxygen and nutrients directly from her blood, and sharing an immune system, and a metabolism. These are biological facts that support the idea it is part of a woman's body, as opposed to a baby where none of those biological facts are true. Instead you offered trolling, ad hominem, and rant after rant falsely implying I didn't know independent meant, while deliberately ignoring the context in which I had used it. Your answers have become increasingly irrelevant and flippant, when @Subduction Zone offered an argument you ignored it completely and flatly claimed he'd ignored the topic. You do this quite often as well, when debate clearly becomes too tough for you.

 

[Sheldon]

It is right to use proper terminology. When you are a doctor, use latin. When you are an everyday person, we call it "baby". Calling a baby "fetus" doesn't change the reality that it is still a baby but it does impersonalize it for your benefit.

Blastocysts are involved in the vast majority of terminations, this is a blastocyst:

This is a baby;

As has been pointed out a Blastocyst and foetus are not sentient, and not biologically independent of a woman's body, they are topologically connected to it, share her immune system and metabolism, and derive all their oxygen and nutrients directly from her blood. Try addressing any of these biological facts with something beyond vapid repetitions of your subjective opinion, or flippant ad hominem.

 

[leroy]

Nope. The woman (of sound mind) has autonomy over her body. If she is of sound mind, she will come to sound decisions regarding pregnancy and childbirth, as she is the one who knows her intentions and the given circumstances surrounding it.

Having the authority over her own mind and body, and possing the liberty to make sound decisions and form sound intentions regarding this, she becomes engaged and more involved in the process, which is necessary in raising up healthy and sentient beings. If you take away this liberty, you may also take away her will to engage in the process of bringing up healthy and sentient beings. You take away this liberty, and she just might not care about what happens, as her own liberty over her own body had been taken away from her, as well as the ability to engage her mind meaningfully regarding this; enslaved by some faceless authoritarian power that refuses to engage with her as an individual and consider her individual circumstances, only offering up shallow orders or maxims.

Sound mind ?

Who descides that?

Does a 12yo has a sound mind , does a victim of rape that is traumatized has a sound mind? Does that deaf familly .have a sound mind...who determines if she has a sound mind? Who determines if the decision sound?

I am not making any argument, I am just trying to understand your view

 

[leroy]

Exactly. Prematurely born fetus connected to machines is a person and can't be killed but unborn fetus of the same age connected to mother is not a person and can be killed.

No no premature babies are conected to the incubator, and are dependent on it.......therefore the baby is part of the machine. and since machines are not alive, nether is the baby ,,, so no problem you can kill it .

 

[9-10ths_Penguin]

Abortion: can a mother hurt the embryo?

1 Let’s start with something uncontroversial that everybody should agree with, you can hurt your own body if you want, your body your choice, if you decide you want to mutilate your fingers, cut your legs or cut your pennies because you feel like a woman, you should have the right to do it … this is not even a hypothetical example, many people descide to hurt themselves and even mutilate their body simply because they feel pleasure by doing so

2 so if the fetus / embryo is part of the mothers body, she should have the right to hurt (but not kill ) the fetus, for example if the fetus is a boy and the mother wanted a girl, she should have the legal right to cut the fetus’s pennies , or perhaps just for fun she should have the right to cut the fetus´s legs simply because she likes the idea of having a child that will always be dependent on her.

It´s horrible but it´s her body and her choice, so she should be legally protected by the law if she decides to do any of that stuff.

3 Or another way to see it, is if the mother has the right to kill the embryo, then mutilating it´s body (and not kill it) should also be ok.

So it seems to be that if you are “pro choice” you should also be in favor of women hurting and mutilating the fetus/embryo

So ether

A) Bite the bullet and grant this right to the mothers (hopping that few if any woman would do it)

B) Provide and argument that would justify abortion and at the same time justify not hurting the embryo, in other words explain why is it ok to kill it and not ok to hurt it.

As wacky as your logic is, I'm going to take the positive from this and say that I'm pleasantly surprised to hear a Christian arguing that hurting children is bad.

Maybe you'd like to express this opinion in this thread as well:

Corporal Punishment Reinstated

 

[leroy]

Logical, empirical and verifiable.

...what is a person? What makes us worthy of the right to live. ?
(Imagine that the question is aked outside the context of abortion)

The answer

_ having consciousness, self awareness, mental ststes, free will etc

_if you dont have this atributes,in this particular moment , but you will have them in the future, you are a person too, this is why people in coma, people sleeping, babies etc are considered persons. And Ofcourse this should include embryos too.

Being a person has nothing to do with being conected, being dependent or sharing inmmune system with others.


If i where a crazy scientist and i conect you to my body such that you are now dependent on me, you will still be a person.

But if i remove your self awareness, free will , consciousness etc you will stop being a person..... you would be a robot or a zombie _like creature

 

[crossfire]

Sound mind ?

Who descides that?

Does a 12yo has a sound mind , does a victim of rape that is traumatized has a sound mind? Does that deaf familly .have a sound mind...who determines if she has a sound mind? Who determines if the decision sound?

I am not making any argument, I am just trying to understand your view

It is generally customary to assume someone is of sound mind unless they present evidence to make you doubt that. This helps to encourage people to engage their minds and to develop sound minds in general all around, which is beneficial for society and for raising sentient beings (whatever their chronological age may be.) Gaslighting someone because you don't like their reasoning is not conducive to promoting sound minds all around society and for raising sentient beings.

 

[crossfire]

...what is a person? What makes us worthy of the right to live. ?
(Imagine that the question is aked outside the context of abortion)

The answer

_ having consciousness, self awareness, mental ststes, free will etc

_if you dont have this atributes,in this particular moment , but you will have them in the future, you are a person too, this is why people in coma, people sleeping, babies etc are considered persons. And Ofcourse this should include embryos too.

Being a person has nothing to do with being conected, being dependent or sharing inmmune system with others.


If i where a crazy scientist and i conect you to my body such that you are now dependent on me, you will still be a person.

But if i remove your self awareness, free will , consciousness etc you will stop being a person..... you would be a robot or a zombie _like creature

Ahh, but unlike a fetus, a zombie (or a corpse for that matter) was once sentient and had self-autonomy.

 

[PearlSeeker]

While a blastocyst is not, correct.

Blastocyst

person

See the difference?

Ofcourse a person looks different at a different age. Should he look the same at all times?

 

[It Aint Necessarily So]

should mothers have the right to mutilate the fetus (but not kill it) such that he would be born without legs.

No. If you're intending to argue that they are essentially the same thing but differ by degree only, and that therefore if one supports (or rejects) one, he needs to support (or reject) both, you need not. I disagree.

Quite frankly the answer is simple
1 no a mother doesn’t have the right to hurt her son (even if it´s located inside the womb)
2 no the mother can’t kill her son

That's your answer, and it could have begun with your religious belief, that abortion is immoral, line (2). It reflects your values. Mine is that the pregnant woman should have the right to terminate her pregnancy if the fetus is pre-sentient. Anti-abortion apologists consistently try to insert their values in their arguments to others, others who simply don't share those values. Their arguments are uniformly unsound to such a person, since they are based in an unshared premise about what is right and what is wrong. If you argue that abortion is immoral because the fetus is a person, a child, human, innocent, a baby, a citizen with rights, being killed to a person who simply doesn't hold those values, you're never going to be convincing.

I'm such a person. Anybody who wants to argue that abortion is immoral for any of the reasons just listed is talking to themselves. He would need to address MY values, or convince me to accept his. And how can he do that when his argument is essentially religious and such thinking plays no part in my moral calculus.

It's a new person. Unless there are some definitive evidence that the foetus is not a person yet.

If your point was that that is somehow relevant to the ethical status of abortion and whether abortion should be considered immoral, I would disagree. Go ahead and call it a person. If so, aborting presentient people is ethical. Go ahead and call it whatever you prefer. Aborting whatever it is now called is not unethical if it is presentient. Call it murdering babies if that's how you feel. OK, fine, then in that language, the way those words words are being used, it is ethical to murder presentient babies.

When is it a person?

For you, whenever you say it is. That's an arbitrary decision with no objective standard. It's also irrelevant to a discussion of abortion unless one believes that it is immoral to abort an embryo or fetus if is called a person.

keep God out of your legislation and put devil worshipers to legislate, and see where your society will go.

If we're talking about America (or ayatollahs or the Taliban), they're the same people. Firstly, God isn't here. What goes into government are people who claim to represent God, like those Supreme Court justices who lied about their intentions in their confirmation hearings. Second, neither is the devil here, but the people calling themselves representatives of God are usually what religious people call evil. Better to avoid anybody who thinks his religion belongs codified into law. It's a secular democracy, or was. Look at what "letting God" into its government has done to it.

fallacies is your favorite word? First word you said as a baby? Just wondering.

I'll bet he learned to say Jesus before he learned what a fallacy was.

Fallacy is one of my favorite words on RF, too. Why? Because I value demonstrably correct ideas about the world, the kind that can be used to accurately anticipate outcomes, and there is only one method for deriving them - empiricism, or the application of fallacy-free reasoning to evidence to generate sound conclusions. A fallacy is a breach from logic, the equivalent of mis-adding a column of multidigit numbers by calling 2+2 five once or more, the equivalent of a logical fallacy. One is going to get a wrong answer doing that. If it matters to him whether the sum is correct or not, then it matters every time there is mis-adding. You're now playing the part of the guy who is tired of being told that he is mis-adding, and asks if that was somebody's first or favorite word.

To say everyone can have discourse in matters of justice and government except God, is extreme secularism gone haywire.

If God wants to propose a bill, He should do so directly. Many don't trust or believe the ones claiming to speak for Him. If I can borrow from religion here, they're usually devils. And there is no such thing as extreme secularism until you get to feeding believers to lions for attempting to inject their religious beliefs into government. That would be extreme and even immoral, since they are presumably sentient. So would cutting off their legs be, in case Leroy was wondering.

 

[firedragon]

If your point was that that is somehow relevant to the ethical status of abortion and whether abortion should be considered immoral, I would disagree.

Thanks but I didn't make that claim.

But on what basis do you disagree?

Go ahead and call it a person. If so, aborting presentient people is ethical. Go ahead and call it whatever you prefer. Aborting whatever it is now called is not unethical if it is presentient. Call it murdering babies if that's how you feel. OK, fine, then in that language, the way those words words are being used, it is ethical to murder presentient babies.

On what basis? How do you decide if it's moral, ethical, or immoral and unethical. How do you decide?

 

[PearlSeeker]

Not hard really is it, now try hard and see if you notice the difference. Lets try an analogy, I'm not really a fan, but theist seem to love these.

Someone stops you in the street, and forcibly cuts your hair, to use the hair to make wigs. Now that's assault right? They had no right take away your bodily autonomy without your consent.

Now you cut your hair and give the hair to someone to make wigs. See the hair has not really changed, but how you can treat it when it's part of someone's body differs legally and morally to how you can treat it when it is not, odd that?

Yes, both (the unborn and the mother) have the right to bodily integrity. If the pregnancy is not wanted it violates the mother's right. If pregnancy is then aborted it violates the right of the unborn. What now? Harm-benefit analysis is necessary. So it's better if the unborn is not killed. This is only the general case. There could be exceptions in some cases...

Let's try an analogy. Imagine seeing a stone falling on a carriage with a baby inside. The stone is big enough to kill the child but to you it would only cause some minor injury. At the moment you are the only one near enough the carriage to save the child. What would you do?

 

[PearlSeeker]

As does the woman, and she is a sentient independent person, and the blastocyst or foetus is not.

Both (the mother and the unborn) having their existence in the game is a special case.