Agreed.
And recriminalizing abortion will only make that even more so the case, as women of means will always be able to get an abortion, but the poor who have no access to local, legal abortion will simply be spouting out not just babies born into poverty, but unwanted baby's born into poverty. How much better if that person could terminate the unwanted pregnancy, stay in school, and have a baby in five or ten years when she was better able to provide for herself and the baby.
Why? I never made that claim. You said, "One of the arguments against it is the right of the unborn fetus and when life begins," and I replied, "Irrelevant. Life doesn't enter into the moral calculus. We kill whenever we fell a cornstalk or step on an ant. The moral argument does not depend on semantics or definitions. It doesn't matter what you call a fetus - person, life, human being, citizen - the moral status of ending that life don't change for me."
I repeat: Words don't enter into the moral argument for me - just the guidance of my conscience. Calling a fetus life doesn't make terminating the pregnancy immoral to me just as calling a cornstalk life is irrelevant to the matter of whether it is immoral to kill it.
Furthermore, adding the qualifier human is also irrelevant, since I have no moral value that says it is immoral to kill a human being. Kill one in self-defense if you must. You'll have my approval.
Nor does calling a fetus a baby change anything.
Legal arguments also don't enter into the moral calculus. Calling abortion murder is irrelevant to the moral issue. Making it murder by recriminalizing it also doesn't enter into the moral argument. Nor do any rights or Constitutional amendments.
It's really only about what my conscience tells me, which is that there is no moral barrier to early term abortion, but that using the state to enforce the will of the church against the will of the pregnant woman is immoral whether done legally as it was before 1973, or not. And removing the availability of safe, legal abortion is immoral, since we know that it will lead to unsafe abortions.
I watched the Netflix documentary on Gloria Allred, a prominent American feminist activist and attorney, and learned that she had been raped at gunpoint at age 25 while vacationing in the Caribbean, before abortion was legal. She was asked if that was the worst thing that had ever happened to her. She answered no, it was the back alley abortion she needed because of the rape. She began hemorrhaging and developed a fever of 106 degrees due to infection, almost dying in the process, and nearly died.
The church would have this back. If your religion or conscience forbids you to get an abortion, don't get one. That's your freedom. But if you would impose those views on others, then you are attempting to use the state to make many women unwilling incubators on behalf of a church.
Those are my values, and they don't change with with semantic arguments.
Conscious and capable of suffering. If I thought the fetus was both of those, I would consider aborting it immoral. Once again, I have no argument for this. It's how I feel. It's what my conscience tells me, and that is what I go by.
How do I know early term fetuses don't suffer? For the same reason that when you crack open an egg and discover that it was fertilized, the chick fetus doesn't start screaming. It doesn't have the necessary nervous system.
Not to me. I don't get my moral values from any external source.
I also don't find biblical advice to be particularly moral apart from the Golden Rule, which is a value of mine, but also didn't come from a book. It's the natural result of the ability to feel empathy, another message from the conscience.
Requiring a father to help support his child hild support is moral and sensible. I'm a humanist, and we believe in facilitating individual development and personal excellence. A baby needs a certain amount of economic support to be warm, safe and healthy.
I've already explained that saying that life begins at conception means nothing to me. I don't care when life begins. When does the capacity to suffer begin?
Irrelevant to a discussion of whether abortion should be legal and available. What might have happened doesn't matter. What did happen does.
My point exactly. You calling it murder is just semantics, and it doesn't change the fact that I prefer to keep abortion safe, legal, and available.
Wrong to you, not me. I recommend that if you find abortion wrong, don't have one. Follow your conscience and allow other to follow theirs.
Or try to impose yours on others if you think that's appropriate. I don't. I consider doing that immoral.
