Abortion | Forum

"But they are people! They feel the pain!"

Short answer: no, they are not people. Maybe they do scream. Cows certainly do. Feeling pain does not make a thing a person. These are fetuses. They have no rights. You get those when you're born.
The only real come back to that is an appeal to emotion - how horrible, absolutely appalling a position that is to take, and maybe so, but as soon as that card is pulled, they have lost the argument.

As the Right often retorts "facts don't care about your feelings"

^that I think is important, because here with this issue of abortion, it is one instance where the right is appealing to emotion just as daftly as the left. It's this one issue - one of only two - that sticks out like a sore thumb to me in terms of the hard-line issues the right is otherwise usually pretty well equipped to defend. 

But here it is anyway.

For the most part, the religious right will stick their fingers in their ears and call for safe harbor options. 

I love how Christians cite compassion for why that unwanted future ward of the state is better off not being snuffed out like a positive screen for Trisomy 21. 

If life was so precious a common mammalian trait wouldn't be neglecting or just eating the offspring.  In fact, humans are the only animal to not reject sickly or unwanted young. 

Abortion seems more compassionate fot the sickly and unwanted.  

Now to the all important "it is human life" part.  

A counter may be, "No it's a dependant mass of dividing cells with no ability for cognition, having only developed (at most) a lump of nerves that will later become involutary function.  Biologically, to be considered 'life' it must be able to surive outside the woom, even if put under incubation". 

It is also worth noting the "proof of pain" concept was tested in a way as bias as "trees have empathy". Both consider any measurable response proof of concept. Despite it just being a reaction (like the nemotacysts in the Jelly Fish) that registers concurrently with the stimuli.  Nerve impulses or a spike in some instrument do not equal capacity for sensation.

The focus on it, like many other things, is thousands of years of species conditioning. And part of that is the ability for many folk to change what they believe periodically.  All arguments against are rooted more in doctrine than choice. 

While there are some exceptions (like black people among others), I guarentee if you did a poll white christian women would be majority against/conservative and agnostic or non-religious would be for choice/liberal. That opinion is malleable and based on politics says there is a legit animal impulse to terminate unwanted offspring.

* Also worth noting *

Planned Parenthood isn't going anywhere. There are enough liberal millionaires and billionaires to keep it afloat without federal funding. 

Personally, if Roe V. Wade was ever struck down, apart from causing riots, many would steal my mom's idea and start taking girls to Canada. Like a coyote for killing unwanted foetuses in defiance of Christian moralizing. 

For now, this:

We're on the same page, here, but it's difficult to argue. It's like "ok, it's wrong to take a human life, but conscription is a whole different matter?" we don't take human life? Never? 

Especially to your point, how do these people think these children whose parents flatly did not want them are going to fare? They're not going to become upstanding members of society. They're going to likely end up in prison. Possibly for murder.

If the parents don't want the kid, it is not going to be raised well. It won't be properly socialized even if adopted. It will likely be abused and neglected and forced to live a life where "I wish I had never been born at all" is reoccurring thought. Abortion would've clearly been the most compassionate choice.

Unfortunately, that's also an argument from emotion and it ends at an impasse. 

The whole debate, as it stands here, hinges on the slippery slope of "what constitutes human life". white stains on my sheets? conception? 24 weeks? 32 weeks? when it can feel? When it can survive outside of the womb? Then what about people on life support? etc, it gets weird. Untenable.

Now I agree with you 120% on the obvious notion that life itself is often a far crueler fate to inflict upon a being than an abortion, but cruelty and compassion are subjective notions that don't translate all that well in a debate. In fact, one is likely to get mired in all sorts of "what if" scenarios. 

The best minds on both the left and the right frame is as: "what about women's rights?" vs "when is a clump of cells a person?" respectively. 

I figure cut the Gordian knot. It's not about the mother's or the father's "rights" at all. It's about that a human embryo does not become a person until it is born. 

You can totally kill human embryos all the way up until the day they are born. It is killing, sure, but it's not murder. Similarly meat is not murder either. It's just killing. 

It's an unpopular opinion. I might get called a big mean poopy-head for supporting it, but it is a just and pragmatic one.

Fundamentally, my stance is "if you're against abortion, don't have one" but that just doesn't seem where the debate has gone in recent years. It now hinges on arbitrary delineations as to when life begins, which is silly because who cares if it is alive? The definition of life is plastic, you can't really work with that. The greatest minds among us are still hammering that out, and it's going to be a long while before they ever report back with a definitive answer. For now, that bar can always be moved. The whole debate revolves around slippery slopes and changing the goal-posts, and this can be easily solved by establishing one irrefutable line in the sand: once it's born, it becomes a person - a baby - an infant - endowed with certain unalienable rights and all manner of arbitrary star-spangled goodness. 

Prior to that, it's just a fetus; even if fully developed. 'Hasn't been born yet .'. is not a person .'. has no rights. 

And I think the position of such and such has no rights is just still too taboo a stance to take. This is a weakness and a delusion stemming from (and I think it is commonwealth law, but don't quote me on this) the idea that a person has all the rights they can imagine by default, and law only intervenes when the exercising of those rights impinges on the rights of others. I see they get mired in this: does a woman's reproductive rights impinge on the right of the fetus as a person to live? 

That's the wrong question to ask.

That question will never be solved except to concede that a fetus is simply not a person and it therefore does not have rights - the unborn do not have rights. This is harsh and pretty grim, too - but truth is like that sometimes. It likely would land a politician promoting such a stance requiring extra security at best, but it's pretty hard to argue against since all the other demarcations of "when life begins" are arbitrary, silly, and beside the point. The question is when does person-hood begin?

In my mind, person-hood begins when you first become conscious of being conscious. And I remember that exact day and where I was when it happened - actually made it a point, consciously, to remember that today tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow, and so on, and some 30 some odd years later, it worked, I still vividly remember it as I commanded myself to. I was six. Maybe that happens earlier or later for some, I wouldn't dare set an arbitrary time-table for that, but with that I can definitely say "birth" is a pretty generous and hard to argue cut-off. 

Beyond the "when does life begin" pinch point (which is easily answered by that it doesn't matter if it is alive, it matters if it is a person), it then all comes down to "should I have to subsidize it?" The answer to that is "well you subsidize war, don't you? Ok then" I actually have more of a problem sending fully developed 18-25 year old people off to their deaths in lands we have no business being in in the first place than the rending of fetuses limb from limb - even if screaming - from the womb of mother who consented. 

Most importantly I get the real impression that this pro-life stance that the Right takes is very weakly defended and almost a sort of after-thought to get the religious on their side. This all due to trying to toe the party line that conservative values are Judaeo-Christian values, and I don't think they necessarily are. Otherwise the right is solid in their argumentation, rock solid except on this issue. 

On this issue, it's conspicuous. Pandering. I like to watch out for these sorts of things. Wherever I find myself agreeing with more than 80% of what some label says, I start thinking "ok, what are you trying to slip-past the ol' BS detectors?" and this happens to be one of those ticket items.