I was discussing morality and not legality, nor are intentional miscarriages popular or even the subject.
When you talk about arresting people, you're talking about the law.
That is an unnecessary distinction. I do not care at what point anything is declared a fetus. My claims concern that Birth is not the line and wherever the line is drawn by arbitrary means as it exists today is no based on anything binding. So the safe and moral course is not to wager the life on the innocent on a line defined by arbitrary means.
Setting the line at birth is not arbitrary. Setting the line at conception is.
Give me an example of one of those "normal" standards.
That it's bad to put children's lives at risk unnecessarily.
An actually good standard is not to take an action that would potentially cause great harm or loss of life that does not have compensating good benefits to justify it. The risk of miscarriage has that compensating benefit, abortion does not in more than 95% of cases. Where it does (as in the risk to a women's life) I am consistent and for it. The lengths that a proponent will go to in order to defend killing human life is only exceeded by the lack of justifying motivation to attempt it. Are we really at that point where death is now good? Some progress.
Actually, I think your position is the one that devalues life.
No, I thought the fact I never mentioned me or any individual would have prevented this statement you made.
Okay - so you don't have an obligation to have kids. That's fine - so we're back where we started: if we assume that the fetus/embryo is a person from the moment of conception, then pregnancy creates a needless risk of the death of a child.
That is an absurd argument. The 95% chance (or whatever the stats are) of successful births are more than justifying compensation for risking the 5% that do not.
It's quite a bit higher than 5%. Here are one set of stats:
For women younger than 35, it’s 10 to 12 percent; for 35- to 39-year-olds, it’s 18 percent. (It does rise to 34 percent for women 40 to 44 years old.) But a great many pregnancies are lost so early that a woman never even realizes that she conceived.
The Truth About Your Top 10 Pregnancy Worries - Fit Pregnancy
Also, keep in mind that failure of a fertilized egg to implant wouldn't be considered "conception" medically (and therefore wouldn't be included in those stats), but would still count if we're assuming that the embryo is a person from the moment the sperm meets the egg. When these are included, the likelihood that a fertilized egg won't result in a live birth is around 1 in 3 to 1 in 4, just like I said.
The one thing that has no justification is either terminating the human race or terminating a significant portion (it's most innocent portion) of it without even a hint of compensating gain.
So you don't consider
avoiding the needless deaths of children to be a "compensating gain"?
Also, we're not talking about terminating the human race. I didn't say that everyone would (or should) stop having kids; I only said that it's inconsistent for anti-choicers to try to get pregnant. This still leaves a number of large groups procreating:
- pro-choice people
- inconsistent anti-choicers
- people who get pregnant accidentally
I guess your are now arguing that continuing the human race is not needed.
I like the human race fine; I just question whether it would be worth continuing if the cost was billions of innocent children's lives. Now... I don't believe that fetuses are children, but if you do, then this is something you need to think long and hard about.
Also, as I pointed out, we're not talking about the end of the human race. Whether or not
you decide to be consistent, lots and lots of people will continue to have children.
Given then adoption of your argument and no children would exist anywhere. Your side would finally have done the entire race in and went into oblivion singing their own praises for rationalizing racial suicide I guess.
Again, you're misunderstanding. I don't want to end the human race. First off, even if all the anti-choicers stopped breeding, there would be plenty of people to keep having kids. Second, what I'm doing is presenting a conflict in your position; there are actually two ways to resolve it:
- accept it as a good thing not to try to have kids, or
- reject the anti-choice position and have as many kids as you were planning to have anyhow.
Personally, I'd rather you took the second approach.
Not surprising.
Are you under the impression I thought we were on the same side?
No, but your arguments seemed to suggest that you thought I was actually arguing that anti-choicers not breed. I thought I should clarify that my actual position is different: that the fact that they do breed shows them to not be as "pro-life" as they claim to be, if they really do believe what they say they do.
Even if you could find a flaw in my reasoning (and you yet to have done so)
What reasoning?
it would be dwarfed by the fact your reasoning kills off the entire race. Good night nurse.
Well, no. Again:
- no matter how many anti-choicers decided not to breed for the sake of the embryos that would inevitably die, other people (as well as inconsistent anti-choicers) will continue to have kids.
- the dilemma doesn't have to be resolved by not breeding. It can also be resolved by rejecting the anti-choice position.