Abortion: The Thread

[Celever]

I am obviously not as intelligent as many of the great posters of this forum so my thoughts are pretty irrelevant but I do wonder what the difference in “extrinsic value” is between an unwanted fetus vs an unwanted child. Not quite sure attributing value to people is a slam dunk argument (Who decides “value”? What gives someone “value”?) but what do I know...

These are good talking points but the answers are pretty instinctive. Everyone or anyone decides value. A human interaction creates value, and once an animal gains their humanity from interaction with other humans, they're a human. That is the difference between an unwanted foetus vs an unwanted child: whoever helps deliver the birth and holds that baby in its arms gives that baby value. It's a memory that they will have of it living and breathing, and an achievement that they have delivered it. That gives the child value.

Before people say "well pro-lifers care about foetuses therefore they have extrinsic value", it has to be two-way street. Not only does the baby give a sense of joy to the person who delivers it and, hopefully, its mother, but the baby gives the person who delivers it greater value by virtue of its gratitude towards them delivering them. If something is unable of giving value back to another human, then it is not human.

I admit that in theory a biological child could fail to be human if everyone who interacts with it also doesn't care about it, for instance if it is known ahead of time that if the baby were to be a girl it would be killed immediately, and upon its birth it is a girl, and no one tries to stop the death after its birth. This was practised in China for millennia and only Buddhists tried to stop it (Christians just kinda wrote about and painted it), and it was rarely something that the state cared to prosecute on. This is because "some Chinese did not consider newborn children fully "human", and saw "life" beginning at some point after the sixth month after birth" (source). If everyone that the child met didn't consider it to be human until it was 6 months old, then it had no extrinsic value until after 6 months and could be killed.

While this practice may sound horrendous to our ears, it's only horrendous if we assume absolute morality exists, which again necessitates spirituality / religious metaphysical tangents which everyone just has their own incompatible views on and ends up disagreeing with. To the Chinese people committing these things, they were just killing animals, and it's western-centric to lambaste them for that.

As it stands, though, in our society once a baby is delivered it almost certainly means something to someone. This means it has value.

 

[cookie]

the rest of your post is essentially just repeating "im right about my world-view and there's no possible way im off the ball". i think it was spot on what was said earlier, there's really no solution because the debate at its core is spiritual. i just think it's a copout to just go with "well these guys are sexually repressed women haters". it's like just a mean ad hominem. many different people have incredible spiritual and god experiences that shape their view of pregnancy and life at conception.

there are objectively bad views of the world, and the belief in something due to a subjective internal experience in the face of real evidence is the type of thinking that hurts people, and in this case definitely does.

how is that a cop out? if you were more sexually liberated you would be less susceptible to this sort of spiritual experience that leads you into the ungrounded belief that fetuses have souls (because sex and procreation are already more decoupled for you, and become more aware of the benefits of abortion as a last resort for maintaining sexual freedom). you should at least accept that this is a belief completely ungrounded in reality. this isn't a "no possible way im off the ball", rather "this is actual scientific fact, in the sense that there is evidence against it, and no evidence for it or even credible theories that suggest it". the existence of souls in fetuses and morality of it are two separate things, and i hope we both agree on the former as objective fact, while accepting that the latter is what people actually disagree on. however, belief in souls in fetuses causes actual harm to women, while the converse is only causing harm if the ungrounded fairytale of souls in fetuses is true. of course someone anti-abortion will still reject this notion, but i think you're right in that there is no actual reasoning with them here because the argument is spiritual.

and i need to re-iterate my point about "women hating". misogyny is measured by impact, not by intent. you can totally think you're helping women and be a misogynist. it's not for the anti-abortionist alone to decide whether they're misogynistic.

biology is misogynistic, and belief in fetus souls enables it.

 

[Myzozoa]

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There is no reason to take anything you say regarding population control and abortion at face value without any evidence to suggest what you are saying is true. Birth rates have much more to do with economic factors and there’s no reason to believe that abortion becoming illegal (which is impossible anyways) would cause “drastic” population increase. And if we don’t want to see babies dying then perhaps we should ban birth altogether. “Prevents real babies from dying” is circular reasoning that wouldn’t convince a detractor in the first place so it’s a pretty useless thought exercise. I am not quite sure if you are suggesting abortion as the most effective kind of birth control (which is an extremist position that is doubtful to gain traction and also in my opinion unfair as it seems to leave the burden to women regarding safe sexual practices) or if you truly believe governments should regulate population via abortion which would seem to be the exact opposite attitude of supporting a women’s right to do what she wants with her body. You got a bit unintelligible towards the end so I’m not sure if you were saying China’s one child policy was a good policy or not but i would be a little concerned if you were...

I think you may be right about saying it would be too far to endorse the one child policy but if you look at the context in which that was said it wasn't an endorsement but a comment on climate change. the important thing is that the framing of the debate should still reflect that state laws dictating what people are allowed to do with their bodies are bad and if it were merely the case that the grounds for this discussion was a disagreement about the morality of abortion then we would not be seeing laws passed effectively banning the provision of abortions. If people who didn't like abortions would just stop getting them then whats the issue? If you don't like em don't get em. But you see this is not a moral debate, it is a debate about whether women are really at the end of the day people with full rights to make choices about their bodies. and btw you can be friends and date women without rly seeing women as a class as full human beings so if you're response to this is I respect my italian gf srry youre out of luck in this debate.

 

[trc]

I am going to blow a fuse, my fucking gosh.

Orch just outlined how a zygote is alive by a biologically agreeable definition. It is not just a clump of cells. I'm getting incredibly sick of repeating that, I'm not doing it again.

I don't understand why you keep pushing this 5th grade understanding of biology (which orch himself misunderstood) when the consideration of a zygote/embryo being a life or not is unrelated to whether or not we should assign value to it. The blood cell discussion was particularly stupid since you seemed to misunderstand it (why argue if a blood cell is a life when it's not the beneficiary of the sacrifice, the blood here is equal to the mother's contribution to continue the zygote's progression).

Conservatives push anti-abortion policies because the people who seek abortions will often not have the resources to raise children to the best of their ability, and so they increase their voterbase by creating more people who have grown up in socioeconomic environments that limit their education (and thus vote conservatively). They only portray it as a spiritual issue so that they can appeal to conservative Christians (which is why the moral values that anti-abortioners justify their views with are so out of sync with the rest of their behaviour).

The reality is that you cannot argue against abortion from a scientific perspective without introducing inconsistencies in your worldview. And since said perspective supersedes a moral one when harm is involved to a party (the mother), this topic is already resolved. I don't even know what purpose this thread even serves except to allow people like you to perpetuate your own misunderstandings.

 

[JALMONT]

I think you may be right about saying it would be too far to endorse the one child policy but if you look at the context in which that was said it wasn't an endorsement but a comment on climate change. the important thing is that the framing of the debate should still reflect that state laws dictating what people are allowed to do with their bodies are bad and if it were merely the case that the grounds for this discussion was a disagreement about the morality of abortion then we would not be seeing laws passed effectively banning the provision of abortions. If people who didn't like abortions would just stop getting them then whats the issue? If you don't like em don't get em. But you see this is not a moral debate, it is a debate about whether women are really at the end of the day people with full rights to make choices about their bodies. and btw you can be friends and date women without rly seeing women as a class as full human beings so if you're response to this is I respect my italian gf srry youre out of luck in this debate.

yeah like i said it was a bit unintelligible towards the end so it's quite possible i missed the exact context. i would definitely agree that promoting women's bodily autonomy is a good strategy as far as climate change goes but the way in which this person presented abortion read more to like a tacit approval of such a policy. but I digress given that I agree this isn't the right framing of the debate

anyways you'll have to forgive me for forgetting that this isn't a moral debate given everyone's insistence the past couple pages to make it a moral one (at least to me!) which is where the waters get muddled more easily for me (it's "western-centric" which i take to be wrong to think it was bad to immediately kill a baby girl upon birth in western china apparently...). overall i do broadly agree with you that the most important point surrounds the question of women's rights. I think that if there is a discussion (which I know you don't think there should be), it should be grounded in the experiences of women and what they need and want. to that end this thread's discussion surrounding the "value" of a human misses what is really important in this "debate".

this thread was started in bad faith anyways and i'm surprised anyone thought it was a good idea but i suppose that's pretty par for the course for cong...

JALMONT I disagree that there was any intellectual oneupmanship happening during that conversation. Kant and Kierkegaard is what our side was arguing the entire time; saying that was me framing the discussion.

The reason why it all mattered is because pro-lifers trying to masquerade as speaking in terms of science and the phenomenal world is why abortion is still illegal in some states. America prides itself on allegedly being a secular state but, as anti-abortion is by definition based in religion and spirituality and doesn't have a valid secular side to it, abortion being illegal is theocratic. By all means I support any state in America's right to legislate that it is a Christian theocracy and then they have every right to ban abortion, even if I disagree with it -- non-Christians can just move out of the state, there's 49 other ones. However, if America is truly a secular state, abortion should be legal by federal law.

you really didn't make a salient point regarding the two...so i fail to see how invoking two dense philosophers by telling someone "just read them" frames the conversation in any sort of useful manner...thx for letting us know you've read them i guess.

If your big concern in all of this is your perception of some kind of hypocrisy done by “America” then I find that kind of sad. Surely there are more important things to do and fight for in life than to simply play “gotcha” with deceit over...a non-living entity’s supposed hypocrisy. that said if you find meaning in doing that by all means, go for it!

back to the shadows i go...