Abortion Beliefs and Arguments
I would like to have a cool-headed, reasoned discussion about abortion. Before you write up a hasty, hot-tempered remark in the comments, please hear me out. If you engage in discussion with someone who holds a different or opposing position to yours, be respectful. Think carefully about your words before sharing them. If you'll lose your temper, don't respond, even if it was a reply to your comment.
Now that we covered some guidelines, I have a specific prompt of sorts that I want you to respond to.
I am abandoning my position and going into this issue empty-handed. I want you to:
1. explain your position on abortion
2. present your arguments for your beliefs
3. give primary arguments against your position as well as your counterarguments
and, for a challenge
4. explain some of the underlying presuppositions or more basic beliefs that lead to your position and then follow them to their logical conclusion when applied to other moral/ethical issues or other areas of life.
Your goal in sharing these four points is to convince me to hold your position.
My part of this is both simple and quite difficult. I am going to examine every response, ask questions, and do my best to read with a completely open mind, willing to be convinced by whichever argument(s) are strongest/best supported. Then, after people either stop talking in this forum and it closes, or so many people have responded it's impossible for me to consider them all, I will write an article detailing the arguments I encountered and my conclusions. The article will most likely be posted on a blog I'm going to be a regular contributer for, though it hasn't actually started yet. I will share the link with everyone once it has been posted. For now though, I need your feedback!
IT'S A DISGUSTING THING TO DO
1. explain your position on abortion
You have the right to do so, and it should not be rendered illegal. My belief in how to go about it is that people should never intentionally go get themselves pregnant and then abort if that was the plan all along. Overall, I think people should absolutely be able to abort if
- they were raped
- they are too young and unable to properly handle children
- they come to the decision that there is no real way to sustain their children and lack means to get them to a proper home
- the mother wants to live, and there is a serious chance of the mother dying upon childbirth
2. present your arguments for your beliefs
- While I would accept some degree of regulation, as abortion should be as huge of a decision as actually having a kid in the first place, I think more regulation makes it more difficult for people with legitimate reasons to do what they need to do.
- You're a dick if you intentionally go around to get pregnant and abort each time.
- Being raped absolutely does not mean you have to have a child. By that point, it's just another link in a series of true fuckups.
- I don't believe teenagers should be having kids at all
- If you made a legitimate mistake, you shouldn't be forced to put someone else through tons of unnecessary trouble because you fucked up
- I think a mother takes precedence for survival over somebody who I do not quantify as being born yet, and that this is ultimately up to the mother
- I think the mother holds the power in each case to make her own decisions
3. give primary arguments against your position as well as your counterarguments and, for a challenge
- Someone else can present these for me, as I don't consider it my job >.> willing to reply to every point posed.
4. explain some of the underlying presuppositions or more basic beliefs that lead to your position and then follow them to their logical conclusion when applied to other moral/ethical issues or other areas of life.
- I think people should generally be able to do as they want to do in life
- I can morally detach myself and speak in terms of humanity as a whole while completely discarding the troubles of individuals, on a case by case basis
- I take a detached view for unborn children, that is, I do not consider them born until they are separate from the mother. Until that time, the mother is the holder of the baby, and thus holder of basically all rights relative to this
There are states here in the US that have prenatal homocide laws that apply upon conception. My issue with this is that I understand murder to be an act perpetrated against a person or persons. This would mean that personhood is a prerequisite for the entity being so acted upon. The aforementioned laws applying from conception onward, I take it that this would mean a zygote would be thought to posses personhood.
Now, I’m sure personhood is a hard concept to define, but I would insist that a necessary component of it is a sufficiently functioning brain. Granting that, the fact the the brain’s primary structures (fore-,mid- and hindbrain) don’t begin to form until around four fetal weeks into pregnancy suggests, at the least, that these laws should not be applicable during the germinal stage; two weeks after fertilization, minimum.
Furthermore, though the primary structures begin to develop during the embryonic stage, what are the neural correlates of consciousness and when do they form? What is consciousness and what is its relation to personhood? I don’t pretend to be able to answer questions like these, but I think they bear addressing if we’re to decide if embryonic or fetal stage abortions can be described as murder.
One counter I can think of to the claim that prenatal homocide can’t occur as early as the germinal stage is that, though a zygote is not a person, it is the first stage in the evetual development of something with personhood and, thus, terminating it is murder. To this I say that the presumption that a person will exist at some later developmental stage does not undo the fact that no such person exists earlier on.
One assumption I’m making is that a functioning brain is a necessary condition of personhood. I think many would concede this point, though there are some who might say that a soul is present from the moment of conception and that that’s sufficient for personhood to obtain. I suppose a second assumption I’m making is that souls are nonexistent and, as such, have no bearing on prenatal development.
I generally don’t discuss anything with the intention of convincing someone to adopt my position. I’m more interested in inviting others to challenge my position, so I apologize if this wasn’t written in the appropriate tone.
But I understand that most people do not agree with me, and that's okay. Everyone has their own opinions.
An ignorant (or unpremeditated upon) choice is the worst thing possible, though.
The REAL problem comes when we try (and mostly FAIL, like we can see everywhere) to define a line between the two.
I can say the same about "free speech" - it's VERY hard to draw a CORRECT line between when it's FREE and GOOD, and when it suddenly drops to ABUSE and PROPAGANDA.
I see this line usually being either nonexistent or blurred to indecent extremes.
And yes, I will straight up claim that the CAUSE of this is nothing but the rejection of READY LINES that come from "beyond humanity".
Whether some logically-short-sighted morons understand (or accept) this fact or not.
It is no secret that you frequently mock and belittle the religious beliefs of other people, but when the pendulum swings the other way and someone mocks your religious beliefs, suddenly it is completely unacceptable. Now is the point where you ramble on and on about how everyone is an idiot except for Jews and you are entitled to mock them because their beliefs are an insult to God and blah blah blah. Not interested in your excuses.
One should aim to live through the heart and without judgment.