you are just so mind numbingly dumb and it has NOTHINGGGG to do with the debate at all.
killing yourself is killing YOURSELF, having an abortion is killing something that IS NOT ALIVE and cannot become alive if you do not choose to let it feed off of you for nine months
Hey - none of that now. Chin up, stiff upper lip and all that.
I really didn’t want to get in on this discussion but:
Zygotes regularly don’t implant on the uterine wall and are passed out of the vagina with a period. They are technically a human being, and this happens all the time. There is no real easy way to tell if there is a zygote being passed, so the statistics on this are very limited.
Even so, “babies” are miscarried very early all the time, in fact more often than are born.
Right, and you would think that this fact would render that particular argument invalid.
But no - American conservatives, instead of recognizing this as an invalidation of their argument, have doubled down, and now attempt to make miscarriage a crime punishable by death, unless it can be proved that the miscarriage wasn’t intentional, which of course is argumentum ignorantiam.
Google ‘Bobby Franklin’.
@assassin
Yes, most people have the same hallucinations when in the same circumstances because those circumstances (nearly dying) cause those hallucinations.
The floating outside your body thing is caused by a disconnect between the senses and the cognitive reception of the information from the senses, and the brain fills in the blanks. They perceive everything they can actually perceive and then fill in the rest according to memory and approximation.
The light at the end of the tunnel and variations thereof are caused by a lack of oxygen in the brain.
So no, it’s not coincidence, it has a documented and verifiable cause that is not anything supernatural or divine.
Hawkeye, thanks for not addressing my argument against potentiality, however crudely worded it was.
The sad part is that those guys would probably get their wives to abort if they were pregnant, and besides aborting is not killing it is just stopping a fetus from growing into a thinking breathing human.
So far it seems Hawkeye has lost almost all his credibility
Wait - that’s a reference to the crude language in my previous comment, isn’t it?
In defense of my reference to your argument, it was metaphor - besides I like crude words, as long as the ideas themselves aren’t shitty. Crudely worded ideas are always better than erudite language describing shitty ideas.
And to be honest, I like that language - a LOT. It’s expressive.
The problem with saying something such as “aborting is not killing it” is that the line is loosely defined as FUCK. Doctors define it as a fetus, religous people define it always alive, and to a point, both are true. The pre-birth organism feeds, but it hasn’t developed fully yet, so it cannot think or breath early on, but it still has the shape of a baby, confusing everyone and hence causing this constant argument.
BUT the problem with the second debate is that many of these people would consider the egg and the sperm not alive, since they have not joined, but how is that much different? The sperms and eggs are living organisms, with complete genes to make a child, they just haven’t finished, which is a huge flaw in both arguments. I think it really should be left up to the woman whether or not she should abort, since the area is gray as FUCK when it comes to defining when it is developed enough to consider it a living organism.
It’s a difficult question - when does human life begin. And I agree that this should be left to the woman.
I have a couple comments:
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I have enough genetic information in most of my cells (except sperm) to make a complete human.
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This IS a difficult argument - but the difficulty is really that one side of the debate is completely informed by a religious belief based on one short passage in the Old Testament - God places a soul in a fertilized egg at the moment of conception. That’s the basis of the argument.
And I think that people are entitled to their thoughts and beliefs, but I don’t think that they are entitled to make laws based on those beliefs - which is disrespectful of the thoughts and beliefs the rest of us.
If a religious woman chose not to abort for the above reason, that would be fine with me, it’s her Right - a Right to a belief and an action based on that belief that these same people don’t wish to extend to the rest of us.
In fact, in the US, abortion is perfectly legal - the debate surrounding abortion is part of an attempt to make it illegal.
The real debate, at least in the US is exactly this. And it seems unnecessary, as any legislation banning abortions based on a religious text is counter to our Constitution.
Politically, the issue has been used as organizational rhetoric - a cause for people - a crusade that gets them to vote for certain candidates.
The Pro-Life Republicans held both houses of Congress, the Presidency, and the majority of the SCOTUS - they could have passed any anti-abortion legislation they wanted or even could have over-turned Roe v. Wade in any one of a number of cases. But they didn’t, because this is a winning issue for them, and they want it to continue, along with some others.
I like the topic because it’s interesting to see what the pro-life people come up with when the pat cliches have been exhausted. There are a few good moral scenarios that demonstrate what pro-life people REALLY think about the issue when you frame it in an unfamiliar context that forces them to make their own choice rather than fall back on stock responses. They’re effective in person, in a real-time, situation where they need to respond conversationally - but probably not as effective in an internet forum situation.
As the Simpsons said (for the United States, at least):
“Abortions for some, little American flags for everyone!”
I say the same thing for abortion as I do for gay marriage: “Don’t want one? Don’t believe in it? Don’t have one.”
Right - EXACTLY. This to me is “The American Way”.
I say abort 'em, abort 'em all!
I really didn’t mean to bring up any bad memories you may have had, it just ended up getting into the conversation. I’m sorry for that.
That aside, though, what if you didn’t know all that? We can’t predict the future, so I don’t see why we should give the fetus that power in this hypothetical situation. I was merely illustrating that we have the opportunity to make choices, so what if we hypothetically gave the fetus that same opportunity, without necessarily knowing what its life would be like. It’s only hypothetical knowledge would be that it could either choose to continue living or choose to die. What would you choose?
Yes, I’m mind-numbingly dumb. How does it have “NOTHINGGGG” to do with the debate, though? Are you really arguing that a fetus isn’t alive? Like, seriously? If you are, you need to do a lot more than that. I think what you’re actually trying to argue, though, is that the fetus is not yet a human, and that IS virtually the ENTIRE debate. How can you legitimately say that it isn’t a part of the debate?
Your misappropriated insults seem to continually blow up in your own face. Maybe you should lay off the insults if you don’t know how to use them.
Both of those examples are natural processes which are not forced on the being by an outside force. I’m not arguing against natural death here, and those are both examples of natural death. The argument here is the issue of abortion, not whether things should die naturally (as if we have some power of that).
Yes, I’ve been utterly discredited as someone against abortion. Disagreeing =/= discrediting. I can say you’ve been discredited because I disagree with you, too. It doesn’t make it so, though.
Sperm and eggs do not each have complete genes to make a child, they only do once they are joined. When that happens, something new is made: a living organism with human DNA and a gender. Without the egg being fertilized, the egg will not form into a human. It’s not that they haven’t finished, it’s that they haven’t even begun.
As it should be. No one has the right to legislate how a person should conduct their lives. It’s one thing to disagree, it’s another to try and force them to agree with you.
That is my major beef with the majority of pro-life crowd. As far as our government is concerned, it’s a non-issue yet used by politicians–who could give a shit about morality–as a distraction to draw voters away from issues that the government should be focusing on. The gay marriage debate is used in the same fashion. Actually, marriage itself is a religious institution, so I think the government shouldn’t only recognize civil unions for everyone. Anyway, the major parties don’t want people to realize how much horrible shit that they agree on, so they use these issues, which the government has no right to butt their nose in on, to make it look like they meaningfully disagree. I mean, look at all the change we got from the hope that came after Bush.
yes, a fetus doesn’t qualify as alive until it’s born. it’s not a human being until it’s born. it has the POTENTIAL to be alive and to be a human being, sure, but it’s not. a cow isn’t a burger until you kill it and make it a burger. it’s a fucking cow.
Dude, a fetus is FUCKING ALIVE. PLEASE EXPLAIN TO ME HOW A LIVING ORGANISM IS NOT ALIVE. YOU ALREADY ADMITTED THAT IT FUCKING FEEDS. HOW DOES SOMETHING THAT ISN’T ALIVE MANAGE TO FEED? WHY WOULD SOMETHING NOT ALIVE EVEN BOTHER TO FEED? IS IT BORED NOT BEING ALIVE? Saying that it isn’t yet a human is a whole other matter, and the major focus of this entire debate. PLEASE STOP CONFLATING THE TWO AND MAKE SOME SENSE. THANK YOU.
Sorry, but repetitious drivel is getting repetitious… :[
Secondly, becoming a burger is not a natural stage in a cow’s development… That’s a false analogy. Birth IS a natural stage in both a cow’s and fetus/human development.
This seems like a extreme definition of ‘person’. And, yeah, I would use ‘person’ instead of ‘human being’, which can be subject to semantic misreading.
I think that if the thing is thinking and processing information, then it’s a person. I couldn’t honestly tell you when that point is or at which point the brain activity is sentience or merely basic neurological functioning. It’s not an easy question.
I wouldn’t call a ball of goo with human genes a “person”. But it’s difficult to agree that humanity starts with birth.
it isn’t alive until it can live outside my body.
She believes that it’s alive as a set of tissues, an extension of the mother. Not that it’s a independent organism, because it isn’t.
One of the many problems with potentiality is this:
I know you already reacted to this comment from someone else, but I think you failed to understand the point the guy was making.
That misses his point. It’s that you assume a specific potential for a fertilized ova. But there’s not just this potential but also this other potential.
Here’s a cut and paste from an older comment.
That’s why potentiality arguments aren’t valid. A potentiality argument is fallacious in form, as is shown.
Aborting a fetus is kind of like killing a spider that’s all up in your shit.
There’s a lot of spiders, some say that if you are indoors, you are never more than 3 ft. away from a spider.
Sometimes a spider is going to decide he wants to freak you out, and then you get the choice of ignoring him, or putting him outside/killing him.
Now you’ve got this embryo growing in you, and it’s going to turn into a human if you let it be. There’s already several billion people, so you get choose between birthing it and getting it removed.
Let [COLOR=‘LemonChiffon’]spider freaking you out parallel [COLOR=‘LemonChiffon’]child growing into a person at your own expense
and so removing that spider before he bites you or something would parallel removing that embryo before it becomes a person
It is a living organism with a DNA code that is independent of the mother. I’m not making any arguments as to whether it can or cannot survive without the mother at that time. All evidence seems to point that it cannot live without the mother for long until sometime around the third trimester. That doesn’t mean it isn’t alive, though, just that it cannot sustain itself without help. It is alive by its very definition. Again, whether one considers it a human life or not is another matter.
She can continue to believe that if she likes, but all evidence points to the contrary.
Except you missed the part where I included non-sentience, or death, as one of the potentialities. My claim is wholly consistent with the potentiality of death as I’ve allotted for it. Good luck easily dismissing it when I’ve included the negative-twin in my potentiality theory.
As for sperm and ova, I also addressed those already. An individual spermatozoan or ovum do not have the potential to become humans. The only potentiality the spermatozoan has is to either fertilize an ovum or not. The potentiality for the ovum is to either be fertilized or not. A zygote is a completely new being with its own set of potentialities. The spermatozoan and ovum cease to exist after the zygote is formed; they achieved their maximum potentiality.
As for cloning, it is not part of the natural development of humans, much like it is not part of the natural development of a cow to become a burger. Do they have that potential, sure, but it is outside forces that create that potentiality and, if actualized, are the outside forces direct cause of it. I am not talking about unnatural potentialities, only those which are natural. That is all that I am addressing and, as such, your cloning example does not apply.
Ramirezoid, that’s fine and dandy if you view a fetus as non-human. I don’t, however, so comparing the killing of a human to the killing of a spider is not a valid comparison, for me, at least.