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Abortion
- Thread starter ZooGirl02
- Start date
From religious perspectives, life is very important. There is a meaning and purpose to it. To deny someone life is very cruel.
Non-religious people seem to rely a lot on 'science', which is constantly changing its mind, to dictate moral decisions. As well as this, once you take away purpose and meaning then life no longer seems quite so valuable or important. Of course, this issue is very individual. Because we all have different morals and reasoning then you will find religious people who have abortions and non-religious people who are against abortion.
Non-religious people seem to rely a lot on 'science', which is constantly changing its mind, to dictate moral decisions. As well as this, once you take away purpose and meaning then life no longer seems quite so valuable or important. Of course, this issue is very individual. Because we all have different morals and reasoning then you will find religious people who have abortions and non-religious people who are against abortion.
Levite
Higher and Higher
I can't speak for other religions, of course. But in Judaism, the question of abortion is serious, because while the halakhah (Jewish Law) does not consider a fetus to be a legal person, in the same way that a baby or an adult is a legal person, it is something more than just an object: it is something that has the potential to turn into a legal person. Therefore, the manners in which it may or may not be permissible to terminate that growth, and cease it from becoming a legal person, must be defined and set forth in an ordered fashion.
Because Judaism has its own laws, its own ethical outlook, its own particular worldview, the paradigm of "pro-life/pro-choice" is simply non-functional in Jewish discussion of abortion. The question has nothing to do with what is moral under American or British or European (or Israeli) or wherever's laws: the question is what the halakhah does and does not permit, and why. The principles, the precedents, the arguments that flow forth from that question are exceedingly complex, which is why there are many interpretations of the law in Judaism. Some rabbis are quite strict in the matter of abortion, and would rarely permit it. But others are more expansive in their interpretations, and see a much wider area in which abortion might be a viable option for a woman under halakhic law.
Atomist
I love you.
Well if that were the case then killing bugs, parasites, bacteria, viruses, sperm/eggs, plants would all be cruel... since they're all life and all have a purpose.
I am speaking in the (spiritual) context of human life and human purpose.
And yes, killing anything sentient is cruel but for different reasons.
Venatoris
Active Member
I think it has something to do with certain religions failing to acknowledge the existence of grey areas on certain issues. Pro-choice advocates don't want people to have abortions every day but they recognize certain situations where it may be the proper course of action. And to be blunt, I don't think it helps that Pro-life proponents also oppose all forms of birth control.
Atomist
I love you.
Okay well I disagree there is a spiritual thing exist AND I disagree that a fetus is a human thing... anymore than my skin cell is or sperm and egg is. But I will accept that you believe that and depute you on
"killing anything sentient is cruel for a different reason"
so by that logic if you kill a tapeworm that is living inside of you that is cruel?
dust1n
Zindīq
Those are the real heroes of this country. Who will shoot down their ego enough to not contribute overpopulating the world that is already so far away from being able to sustain of it's scarcity and endure the ****-tiness and judgmental crowds associated with abortions.
ButTheCatCameBack
Active Member
I have no problem with abortion being legal. I'd also have more sympathy for the anti abortionists if they weren't so often misguided and they take two steps back for every one they try to take forward.
It's justifiable but it isn't nice.
Abortion is the killing of innocent lifes. Of course few people will support it, particularly those who believe births were "meant to be". Specifically, many Christians and Muslims believe that God wouldn't allow pregnancies that are ultimately destructive, while many reincarnationists seem to believe that an abortion is cheating one out of a life that he had earned.
I wouldn't say that those views are outdated. To me the real trouble with discussions about abortion is not one of how ancient the rules are, but rather on how restricted the discussion is. The matter has interesting parallels with both the discussion about suicide and the discussion about drug use.
First of all, it must be made clear that AFAIK there is hardly anyone defending abortion itself. Abortion is a serious matter that leaves all kinds of scars even when it is done justifiably and correctly. Even many pro-choice people will often decide not to abort when given the choice. To paraphrase, the best abortion, much like the best war, is that which is avoided entirely.
Still, IMO the right to abortion should be maintained, albeit as a part of a larger and more ambitious frame of rights and social support. It is naive and, yes, dangerous to assume that it is better to pressure someone into having a child that she does not feel ready and willing to raise than to giver her proper support for an abortion.
It must be recognized that even death is sometimes better than the alternative. And that is where many religious movements have a very unconfortable time. For a quasi-religious, and IMO wiser perspective you may want to read some Peter Singer. The point is that as a rule people only consider an abortion because they feel that their only choices are facing undue suffering or else kill the embryo (or fetus). The true challenge of decisions regarding abortion is certainly not giving a generic answer to over-reductionist questions such as "should it be legal" or even "is it morally justifiable", but rather spending adequate effort in recognizing how accurate that perception of a choice of "abortion or undue suffering" is, and how better to deal with it in an individual basis.
For starters, there are already some steps in that direction, which curiously aren't often either defended or questioned in any clear terms. Many jurisdictions and certainly many moral and religious opinions accept abortions for reasons such as medical danger to the mother-to-be and conceptions caused by rape. Both are terrible dilemmas that also have enough public sympathy to grant a degree of support and allow some openness on the matter.
That is alright, but still too timid. Most abortions offer similar yet unsufficiently recognized dilemmas, such as conceptions that happen with couples that are too young to really decide to raise a child or that are simply not sufficiently prepared to take such a responsibility, be it for lack of vocation, family support, economic capability or even emotional structure.
There is a severe degree of often well-meaning yet bizarre and destructive exageration about the joys of having children running around these days. I will go so far as to say that many people sincerely believe that births won't happen to people who can't deal with them in a healthy way because it just hurts them way too much to recognize that it is not so. Yet the reality is that not only there are boatloads of people raising children basically because they have no choice, but it also creates a variety of undesirable situations that cause suffering in all people involved. Worse yet, such suffering is actually transmissible and hereditary. Unhappy parents are NOT necessarily (or IMO even usually) better than the alternative. Children that learn to banalize unspoken yet easily detectable resentment for their own existence will raise to become fertile grounds for resentment of their own, drug use, and in all likelyhood will become unhappy, abusive parents themselves - basically because they can't very well deal with the emotional pain themselves and therefore choose to keep the ball rolling instead of solving the problems (which may well be indeed beyond their means to resolve).
The true solutions for those dilemmas can't possibly be found by addressing abortion as if it existed by itself. It takes a serious effort to question and improve the existing family structures, emotional situations and overall goals. Perhaps even more urgent is to revise moral and religious expectations so that they are more realistic, more pious and less fearful. For instance, the whole idea of promoting abstinence-only sex education for teenagers is some sort of dark comedy that costs lifes and brings misery (financial and emotional) for whole generations. That the population does not recognize and fights it en masse is more than a bit disappointing.
McBell
Unbound
I never did understand how the "meant to be" argument really justifies being against abortion. It ranks right up there with "Ruining gods plan" when it comes to useless arguments.
I mean, how do they know what was "meant to be"?
Did it ever occur to them that perhaps the abortion was "meant to be"?
"Meant to be" is merely another one the many self serving, man made, bull **** stories people use to justify their own bias and prejudices.
Atomist
I love you.
okay, fine I'll argue same with abortion. And it's been demonstrated that fetuses don't have a nervous system that can feel pain until the 26th week
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I'm not sure I agree with that observation that mostly non-religious people are pro-choice. On one hand, I agree that the majority of people who are not religious tend to be pro-choice. But, I disagree that the majority of people who are pro-choice are the non-religious. The US has something like 40% of people accepting pro-choice, but the population does not consist of 40% non-religious. I'm not sure what the statistics are like in other countries.
Abortion is often looked down upon because it's a gray area. A fetus has the ability to eventually become a sentient being, but at the moment it is not (assuming it's early-term).
While I don't like abortion, I have no problem with it being legal, as long as it is performed within the first trimester or at the very least before the 20th week. At that point, the structures for feeling pain begin to be developed.
An analytical approach is a method that constantly corrects itself to be more and more accurate in terms of knowledge. What other method of determining truth can say the same?
Saying that non-religious people take away purpose or meaning is without basis. These things are relative- some religious people have a sense of purpose or meaning, while some do not, and some non-religious people have a sense of purpose or meaning while others do not. Furthermore, the purpose or meaning that some religious people have tends to seem very meaningless to some non-religious people. Personally, I've yet to hear a religious person describe something that sounded meaningful or purposeful to me.
Something like 50% of pregnancies end in miscarriage. The numbers are hard to determine, because many miscarriages occur before pregnancy is known. A smaller but still significantly large percentage (10-20%) of known pregnancies end in miscarriage. Did the gods not have purpose for those beings? So it seems that while some humans may not consider a lost fetus to be extremely troubling, neither so do the gods, because their systems abort more fetuses than humans do.
So I have trouble understanding how one can say that abortion intrudes on some plan. The plan itself already seems to get in its own way, and if humans can interfere with it then it is not a robust plan anyway.
A lot of things have been demonstrated, constantly contradicting. I wonder what the next experiment will tell us.
It's a pretty good approach but sometime difficult to trust considering that it is 'constantly correcting itself'. If a scientific test produced a particular result five years ago that everyone considered truth as it was 'science' but now there is a very different result, I will just wait a few more years to see if something else comes about to completely change or contradict it. It makes trusting the accuracy of this method a little difficult at times.
As to the first part, that's what I already mentioned.
The second, I don't know what religious explanations you have heard. The Vedic reasoning holds a lot of meaning imo. Without the human body, the soul cannot progress beyond the material platform of life. Killing a person is making their journey longer and harder.
What do the gods have to do with this? I'm not a Christian.
Again, I'm not a Christian so this argument is not something that I would argue against.
In Hinduism we are mainly dealing with issues of karma and reincarnation.
Generally speaking, the process releases fairly accurate results. With science, people have gone to space, drastically improved healthcare (I'd be dead without modern healthcare), constructed the internet that allows us to communicate right now, and harnessed the energy of the atom for better or worse.
And for many things it's possible to take into account possible errors. For instance, many scientific findings suggest that a fetus doesn't have the ability to feel pain until the 25th or 26th week of pregnancy when a certain brain connection forms, and some scientists suggest it may take even longer than that for the fetus to experience pain. But I am against the concept of legal abortion, except possibly for grave emergency health matters, after the 20th week, because the 20th week is when the structures for experiencing pain approximately form. It's the earlier of two critical dates as a safeguard. And really, if an abortion is going to be done, it should be done before then to be even safer.
The Vedic worldview is more elegant than most in my opinion, and one that I've adopted a portion of my worldview from, but I've still not seen a description of it that seems meaningful to me.
As for that last line, if the person was going to be killed, then Karma determined it, right? Besides, if Karma was set up with ease in mind, then miscarriage wouldn't be so common among pregnancies. And if there are constantly babies being born at any given time, then a soul could be transmitted to a new birth fairly quickly.
I wasn't talking about Christianity. I used the term "gods" to be as inclusive as possible.
Don't many Hindus believe the ultimate personality of god has set the law of Karma in motion, or no? And there can't exist purpose without intent, so if you're using the concepts of higher meaning or higher purpose, you must be incorporating a god in there somewhere.
Besides, what could the purpose of Karma possibly be to have so many unnoticed pregnancies result in miscarriages due to chromosome errors or whatever? It's not saying much for the sacredness of life if Karma or gods let much of it die when it first spawns.
I am constantly coming across real life situations that contradict scientific 'findings'. One recent example is that a friend of mine's sibling gave birth to a five month old baby. Generally this is a very serious situation, but the baby survived and is very healthy. It was conscious, felt pain etc.
So yes, you are right and scientists have done a lot. But they don't know everything.
Karma is very complicated. In a sense you are correct. Yes, it's the person's karma to die. But it was not your karma to kill it. The death becomes your responsibility and through the act, you become karmically linked with this person.
But to use the argument that their karma would kill them anyway is not good enough. It is like saying, well it's ok if I shoot this person or make them suffer terribly because it's their karma anyway.
I cannot give you a definitive answer for your last question because every individual thing that happens is a result of a series of previous karmas/actions. One miscarriage might occur for one reason that is completely different to why is happened in another situation. Maybe one miscarriage occurred because that individual aborted a baby in its previous life. Maybe it is karma to the woman who desperately wants a baby but cannot due to her previous bad choices. Maybe the baby and mother are linked up karmically with the abusive man who beats the woman frequently, causing the miscarriage. But this is all speculation.
I do believe in God, but I am not a dualist. God is not a distant being who decided to create us with a purpose in mind. The material universe is a part of God's very Self. Material nature and the laws of science are part of God's very self. Us individual souls are part of God's very Self. None of this has ever not existed and thus was never 'once created'. And so karma is a natural part of existence rather than a set up by God who wanted some system of justice. It's the laws of cause and effect that extend to a metaphysical plane of existence.
In other words, our morality is not based on what we think God will do to us or think of us (or a plan that he has for us). Our actions result from two prominent places- our awareness of karmic reaction and how selfish/selfless we are.
Atomist
I love you.
So what? we should go with what the facts are as we know them, even if they could change.