A few years ago I read an online exchange between two self-described Christians that has lingered with me as a good summary of our cultural moment. One of the speakers identified as bisexual, but also as a Christian, and was arguing with more traditional Christians about sexual ethics. During one exchange, one such commenter asked her to provide a coherent moral argument for why Christians should change their beliefs about sexuality and marriage. Her response was simple: “My existence is not a moral argument.”
I remember reading that line and thinking that such a response, while not necessarily convincing, was nonetheless powerful in its own way. For this woman, sexuality was not an issue, it was an existence, and it was beneath her most fundamental moral sensibilities to actually explain her life and her choices. She didn’t need to. She knew who she was, and that was that. I didn’t really admire the logic of it, but I had to admit: She had a point.
But my admiration was short lived. As I read more about her, I saw her work on other topics. Now she was talking about abortion. Shortly after confidently declaring that her existence was not a debate topic, she had fired off effusive defenses of Planned Parenthood, including a leave-no-doubt defense of abortion rights and unmistakeable contempt for anyone that would try to tell a pregnant woman what she could or could not do with her body.
I sighed. Honestly, I wasn’t surprised, but I wish I had been. This writer was authoritative in assuring the primacy of her bisexuality over other people’s moral judgments. Her bisexuality was a fact, not an issue to be debated. But when it came to the unborn, when it came to the tiny human bodies that exist hidden inside other bodies—well, that was a complex moral issue, and dogmatism there was unacceptable. Her existence was not a moral argument. Theirs was.
Was this merely a case of an appalling lack of self-awareness? Was she honestly unaware of the inconsistency here? Could anyone be so blind? It’s possible, I suppose. But I don’t think she was being inconsistent. The self-authentication of her sexuality was, sadly, not the germ of a pro-life ethic. In fact, it was the antithesis of it. Why does the current of the sexual revolution—especially emphasis on the radical autonomy of the body and self-determination over transcendent norms—not carry its members to the delta of unborn personhood? The answer is that it was never meant to. Abortion is the sexual revolution, and the sexual revolution is abortion. To speak of one is to speak of the other.
The sexual revolution’s assault on the bodies of the most vulnerable is one of its most nefarious, and under-discussed, legacies. Family disintegration, no-fault divorce, pornography, the redefinition of marriage, and now radically dehumanized gender ideology are usually thought of by conservatives as equal-opportunity afflicters. In a sense, that’s true.
But it’s also true that these trends particularly affect the poor, the weak, and the socially disadvantaged. For example, research suggests that pornography addiction stymies the psycho-social development of young men, resulting in fewer meaningful relationships and a greater propensity for isolation and entertainment binging. How this dynamic especially harms poorer and less connected men is obvious. Men whose lives have been stagnated by pornography experience a cruel irony: Their pornographic fantasies reinforce their sense of entitlement, but those addicted become actually entitled to less and less.
The more important reason, however, that the sexual revolution disproportionately harms the under-privileged is that such persons are the ones who most benefit from that which the sexual revolution most directly attacks: Community. Divorce is not healthy for any child, but its effect on children who become adrift between adults with competing custody claims is more serious. Severing children’s most important connection to home, the marriage of their parents, can and often does have far-reaching consequences to their sense of belonging and self-esteem. In his recent bestseller Hillbilly Elegy, author J.D. Vance vividly recounts how the separation of his parents, as well as his mother’s struggles with addiction, shaped his adolescent sense of himself and his future.
Further, the internal logic of no-fault divorce is that since marriage is more or less a mutually consenting business contract—certainly not a “covenant”—making it easy to dissolve befits the autonomy of both spouses. No one, the thinking goes, should have to stay married to someone they no longer wish to be with. Interestingly, the reasoning behind the redefinition of marriage is almost the perfect inverse of this logic. No one, it is said, should be prevented from marrying someone that they do wish to be with.
In both divorce and same-sex redefinition, the concept of marriage becomes “owned” by individuals, not by community (past or present). What is marriage? It’s whatever you decide (consensually, of course) it is. This mentality, whether expressed in no fault divorce or marriage redefinition, ploughs down tradition and covenant—which are both, by definition, community ideals.
The assault of the sexual revolution on community is the key to understanding the logic of abortion. It is impossible to attack the moral value of community without necessarily attacking the moral value of individuals themselves since those individuals are inevitably and inextricably members of different communities.
This means that the sexual revolution’s rage, while is allegedly directed outward toward the objective constraints of oppressive morality, ends up being directed inward, toward the self. This is the paradox at the heart not only of abortion rights, but of transgender ideology (wherein the absolute worth and autonomy of inviduals somehow necessitates surgical war against the body).
Rod Dreher, writing about transgender icon Caitlyn (Bruce) Jenner, makes this connection explicit. Jenner’s understanding of who he is as a gendered person is, Dreher writes, radically anti-body. It’s this same subjection of bodies to all-powerful wills that fuels the Planned Parenthood industry:
In both the Caitlyn and Planned Parenthood cases, the stand you take has everything to do with what you think it means to be human, and how you relate the human being to the natural order. Modernity generally sees the material world as meaningless matter that we can fashion however we like. The older world — including the world of Christianity — teaches that God is intimately involved with Creation, and that we therefore have strict limits governing how we should treat it, including our bodies. A big problem is that far too many modern Christians have lost that older, classical Christian metaphysics, and no longer view the body and nature as bound inextricably to the divine.
Dreher gets right to the contradiction at the heart of the sexual revolution: Its rhetoric emphasizes the value of individual autonomy, which is allegedly so precious that it cannot be accurately evaluated by the moral imagination of the community. In practice, however, the sexual revolution separates individual identity from one’s material being so completely that mutilation, either of the born or unborn, is suddenly compatible with the ideals of human freedom and equality.
Maintaining this worldview requires active hostility toward the body. It also requires a steady rejection of the physical creature itself, relying more on ideology than biology to explain what a person is. The most recent example of this was Moira Weigel’s essay for The Atlantic, in which she argued, as the original title indicated, “How the Ultrasound Pushed the Idea that a Fetus Is a Person.” Weigel, not a doctor or scientist but (according to The Atlantic’s author bio) a “doctoral candidate in comparative literature,” showed such astonishing ignorance of basic biological fact in her essay that The Atlantic’s editors were compelled to officially correct the piece no fewer than 5 times, corrections that culminated in a telling revision of the piece’s title: “How the Ultrasound Became Political.” The change was wise. The essay was little more than a lengthy appeal to abortion rights ideology, which would have been standard pro-choice fare if not for the direct line of attack that Weigel took at fetal personhood.
But the collapse of her claims illustrate how dependent abortion rights advocates have been on shifting the topic away from the philosophical debate over personhood and toward slogans and euphemisms, such as “safe, legal, and rare.” There is evidence that the softened tone of the Clinton-era abortion rhetoric is losing its charm with the younger generation of feminists and advocates, who seem to have grown impatient with this kind of thinking. They believe rather that, in the words of Katha Pollitt, abortion is a “positive social good” that should be encouraged, not even passively shamed by words like “rare.” This is the fundamentally anti-body nature of the sexual revolution flinging back its shroud.
Understanding the ideological DNA of the sexual revolution is necessary for understanding the many apparent contradictions of progressivism. On the one hand, the disintegration of public sexual morality, feminism, and the redefinition of marriage all seem to be movements of personalism against abstract notions of the objective and the transcendent. These movements seem to be pro-people.
But on the other hand, this movement seems coterminous with other movements, such as abortion rights, assisted suicide, and gender ideology, which endorse a strong—even violent—bifurcation between the person and the body. If we fail to understand the operative ideas at work in the sexual revolution, this seems to be an inexplicable contradiction.
But it is no such thing. It is instead a singular narrative of who human beings are, a narrative that could not possibly contrast more vividly against the narrative offered by the gospel, which teaches a holistic human dignity that values community and understands human persons as both body and soul.
Rather than see abortion in wholly culture war terms, pro-life conservatives ought to understand it as a vestige of the nihilism of the sexual revolution. We ought to address it politically, because the personhood of unborn bodies is a deeply political issue. But we must also address it religiously, and philosophically, and communally. Abortion exists not because babies are inhuman but because adults believe themselves, at some level, to be something less than human. That is not merely false ideology. It is a wound, a wound that pro-life, especially evangelical pro-life, stands ready to help heal. As Russell Moore has stated, the sexual revolution has and will continue to have a refugee crisis. The question for pro-life is: Are we ready to receive them?
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i have struggled with this issue as a Christian. I’am pro-choice, simply for the reason that i don’t believe in forcing someone who is pregnant against her will to carry to term. I do believe it should be a choice or not to continue pregnancy. I am a strong pro-ponent of bodily autonomy and just believe a woman’s right comes first. This has nothing to do with the sexual revolution or dehumanizing the unborn. I just believe that a woman should not have to go thru pregnancy and childbirth if she so chooses not to. As i have stated, i have struggled with this issue, i have sought God on this and find myself, siding with a woman’s right to choose especially in the 1st trimester. I don’t equate a 4-6 week embryo to have the same rights as an autonomous individual such as the pregnant person. I
You repeatedly say you have struggled with this issue, but what exactly have you been struggling with? What is your argument from which you conclude that women will be forced against their will to carry a baby to term if they are not free to kill that baby? Who is forcing these women to do this? Pregnancy is a natural function of humanity after all. We did not invent it and it is not by and large forced on women.
I struggle because I can see both the pro-life and pro-choice arguments and they both are right in some way, and they are both wrong is some way too. I have an issue with giving zygote/emboyo’s personhood, I don’t believe that they have any rights. I believe in a womans’ bodily autonomy and her wishes come first before the embryo/ zygote. At the same time I don’t believe in abortion after 2nd trimester when it is more developed. So my stand is a more middle of the road position. I have no issue with banning abortion at viability which is 22-24 weeks, at that time it can live outside the body.
I do believe that if you deny a woman in abortion, yes you are forcing her to REMAIN pregnant and I find that abhorrent and a violation of a woman’s right to her body. Just because pregnancy is natural does not mean its always welcome.
I also did believe strongly in people being responsible and using contraception responsibily
Abortion is unnecessary, if a woman doesn’t want to get pregnant she should not have sex. This solves the problem without anyone dying.
I’m literally laying next to my few week old son as I type this. You can imagine this does not make me very sympathetic to your view. Hard to look at him and think someone who argues he may as well have been killed just weeks ago has a point worth considering.
Also, for what’s it worth. The womans right to her body argument is absurd. It works just as well for a mother who doesn’t want to take care of her newborn as it does for the mother that wants to kill her unborn. One could also apply it to eating, and if this right to her body means society must provide a way for a woman to have her unborn child killed, it follows equally that society must provide a way to prevent a woman from digesting the food she consumed for those women who “rightfully” don’t want their bodies effected by the food they ate.
So now you are saying that married women like me should not have gotten married. so you are saying that one cannot marry for companionship only, one must bear children? How very gracious of you. You are being very emotional about this issue because you have a newborn, so their is no point in discussing this rationally because you cannot be rational.
No, not saying women must bear children. Don’t be ridiculous. I am only saying that people have no right to be free of the natural consequences of their choices. This applies to men and women both with respect to the natural consequences of having sex.
Women must bear children, I disagree, becoming a parent is a choice, not default, we are not animals that are controlled by our biology, or are you saying because we can have children we must?
I answered this in the first sentence of my above comment.
To re iterate, both men and women should be free to choose to have sex. If they choose to have sex, they are responsible for the results of their choice. Why are you deciding to not comprehend this?
i comprehend it , i just reject it. It is called mitigating consequences, we do it all the time.
** I am only saying that people have no right to be free of the natural consequences of their choices.**
Then you agree that you should never go to the dentist again, right? You have no right to be free of the natural consequences of your choice to eat candy and not brush your teeth.
Bodily autonomy is not absurd, it is very important to a lot of women. Pregnancy is a life threatening condition and women should not be forced to gestate against their will. You want to use government to stop doctors from performing abortions and or prescribing an abortion pill. A newborn is not inside a woman’s body anymore, not a close analogy.
When you say pregnancy is life threatening do you mean that you think all pregnancies are life threatening to the mother or just that some are? If the latter, I am not aware of anyone who thinks if there is good reason to believe the pregnancy will kill the mom and baby that nothing should be done about it. If the only possibilities are both die or the mom lives, it’s not hard to side with someone living…pro life is pro life after all.
No, what follows is that if a means exists for a woman to NOT digest her food, society has no right to prevent her from using those means.
Yeah well life is not that simple though. Their are married women that have abortions too, and birth control fails. I don’t believe it is that black and white. My position as I stated is that a accept 1st trimester abortions, not late term ones. So no I don’t approve of abortion at 7-8 months, which at that point their is no need for an abortion anyway, fetus can live outside the body.
Please understand that to me a 4-5 week embryo the size of peanut is not considered a baby or a person, thus I don’t see it as being necessarily inmoral or bad to abort at that stage. I do believe the mother’s rights supersede at that stage of pregnancy. I know you will not agree with me and that is fine, I don’t expect you too. It is really sad because it seems that every pro-life person I speak to just say the same thing “don’t have sex”, and completely forget that we are all flawed human beings and that is NOT a realistic answer. I would definetly encourage people to use birth control and yes to abstain. Are you going to tell that to a married person too that maybe does not want to have children or are done having all of their children and their birth control fails.
I just think that we need to be a little more empathetic to people’s situations and not be so black and white about this issue because life is not black and white all of the time.
It is, married women shouldn’t have sex then either, and depending on circumstances they shouldn’t have married at all if they are unwilling to be pregnant. Pregnancy isn’t a disease. There is no right to be spared from the natural consequences of the choices one has made.
That you say that a 4 to 5 week old unborn baby is not a person *to you* says everything. It clearly makes no difference *to you* what the facts are and even if you might be wrong. This is all about whatever it takes to be spared from dealing with the natural consequences of ones choices even if that means someone must die. It is also completely arbitrary, someone else could make your same argument about 4 to 5 week old born babies. They could just say they are not people to them and thus it is not wrong to kill them.
**It is, married women shouldn’t have sex then either, and depending on circumstances they shouldn’t have married at all if they are unwilling to be pregnant.**
What sort of la-la land do you live in? How old are you? 13?
**Abortion is unnecessary, if a woman doesn’t want to get pregnant she should not have sex. This solves the problem without anyone dying.**
How about, if a man doesn’t want an abortion to happen, HE should not have sex. This solves the problem without violating the rights of thinking, feeling people.
I think one thing to note here is that the Prolife argument does not admit the idea of any individual granting personhood rights. It makes little difference whether you see them as an individual or not.
And I believe you may see the concern that could be raised that if you deny personhood on the grounds of sensation or size, there are other groups of individuals that could be denied personhood as well. Certain severely handicapped individuals possibly.
Also, I’m uncertain on what grounds you use the criteria of size and sensibility for personhood. The lack of a basis for authority would cause me to ask why you would not include the criteria of intelligence, for instance.
To me it is just common sense that an embryo that has no feeling, no brain, is dependent on its mother, does not have the same rights as the mother. Yes i do value liberty more than life. The issue i also have is that by not allowing abortion, you are forcing a woman to gestate against her will.
I think we’ll need to work through the two halfs of your argument separately. On the one hand, you point out the hardship that pregnancy can pose for a woman. That’s the first half.
On the other hand, you point out the lack of personhood on the part of the embryo. That’s second half.
If a mother finds raising a child of two a hardship, she has little recourse because the eliminating the child would obviously be wrong, regardless of the hardship involved.
On the other hand, if the embryo is not a person and has no rights, the mother is free to terminate the pregnancy for any reason, with no need to appeal to hardship or any other factor.
Does that make sense?
i sent you my email if you want we can discuss there.
Thanks! I just replied.
I think part of the problem with this whole debate is the wider issue of rights, it becomes a debate between those who argue for the right to life and those who argue for the right to choice. Now one of the two key tenets of Liberalism, whether “conservative” or “progressive”, is liberty hence as in your argument a woman has a right over her own body. On the other hand the existence of any rights presupposes the right to existence in the first place as only by existing can anyone have a right to anything, hence the right to life precedes the right of autonomy. This then produces a conflict between the fundamental right to life of the one dwelling within the womb and the right to choice of woman whose very womb it is.
The underline problem for Christians is that Christian philosophy pre-dates and contradicts that of Liberalism. Christianity does not have the concepts of rights per-say even if the concept of rights emerged from Christian thought. For Christians the understanding of humanity is Ontological, we were created in the image and likeness of God and where created good, we where also given freedom to live with God, our rejection of God in paradise is a rejection of that very freedom which is found not in individual choice (the false liberty and self-slavery of the devil) but in freely consenting to the Good. Christian understanding of humanity is then focused on what it is: The image and likeness of God. And what its aim is: The transformation of the human person towards union with God, i.e. Theosis. This also supposes a transcendent nature of morality based not on autonomy of the will but on God. As such the in the case of abortion the conflict is not of conflicting rights but choosing the good or rejecting the good for evil; God is Life and created humanity for life, to choose to take away that life for reasons of personal autonomy is a rejection of God and man’s telos.
Now in more contemporary western and practice terms it is right to say that if we consider ourselves to have rights then we also have responsibilities. For a pregnancy to occur a man and a woman must have sexual intercourse, if they choice to do so outside of marriage from a Christian perspective this is already an irresponsible act, if they do so in such a way as for a pregnancy to occur then they are responsible for the consequences. If a child is conceived it behoves both parents to care for that child the woman taking the greater role in baring the child the man in being responsible for the woman and his child. Abortion is a way to reject that responsibility but more so the very consequences of the act which lead to that responsibility. Effectively they consider taking the life of the child of less importance then having to bare the consequences of the actions (in the woman’s case being pregnant) and take responsibility for resulting conception and the child which would eventually be born.
i agree that to some extent their is a philosophical divide on this issue. I am a Christian, but i don’t necessarily see life as being sacred as a lot of the pro-life see it. I think in a lot of ways the pro-life side is elevating life more than it deserves and are worshipping instead of God. I will agree that i tend to side on the side of liberty more than life and that is probably a flaw of mine. At the same time i do believe it an issue of loving your neighbor. If you love your neighbor, you don’t force a pregnant woman to remain pregnant against her will and you would value her life over an embroyo, my intuition operates more in that manner. I am not conviced that God necessarily is as concerned about embroyo and fetuses as he is over born people, in that in the old testatament babies were not even counted until sometime after they were born.
I am not stating that i think abortion is morally right, in truth i am not sure, i think it might be one of those that fall in a gray area. I have a very deep aversion of telling others how they should live their lives (again i tend to side on liberty) and or judging them. I just believe abortion to be a private issue that should be between the person affected / her family /doctor.
So your idea of love your neighbor means if your pregnant sister wants help killing her baby you help her. Got it.
You might really want to rethink what love means because it probably does not mean killing innocent human beings.
If my sister wanted an abortion, yes i would, that her right. She has the right to end a pregnancy if she wishes. I would not tell her that she HAS TO remain pregnant if she does not want to, that is not being empathetic, it would be tyrannical to say that. I would put her needs/wishes first , so to answer your question YES.
That is just so “lovely” of you that you would help murder your own niece or nephew.
You clearly don’t really struggle with this. You parrot every inane pro murder talking point.
My sister comes first , I love her and care for her well being over any potential niece or nephew. if she was in distress and wanted an abortion, yes I would help her, I don’t apologize for it either. Are you saying you would not if were your sister?
That blood in your veins must be ice cold.
Ice cold would be to say to a distressed pregnant woman. I don’t care if you are sick and in distress, you have to remain pregnant, and saying to them ” you caused this to yourself” so I am not helping you too bad! does that seem compassionate to you and loving? Is that how Jesus treated people or was he compassionate and forgiving. I do care about thinking already born people over an embryo that has no feeling, and is not even aware of its own existence. I don’t get it how can someone care more for an embroyo than a pregnant woman, to me that is ice cold.
Please just drop the Jesus stuff, using Him to justify murder is sick.
Do you know the size of an embryo at 5-6 weeks (when most abortions occur) is the size of a peanut, it is not a baby, it will grow to be a baby, but is is not a baby it is a human embryo with no brain, no lungs, it cannot live outside the body. Do you think i would put it before my sister that is already here and breathing and thinking and feeling? that is what to me boggles my mind that people actually care about an embryo more than the pregnant woman
Also, please drop the false dichotomy. The only options are not either coldly dismissing distressed pregnant women or helping those women terminate their pregnancies by killing their babies. People can care about both the mother and the baby.
It is not false if the woman desires not to be pregnant. If my sister comes to me is distressed wanting an abortion and needs my help (say a ride to the clinic, or money), I have two choices I can choose to help her or not help her. I will choose to help her, in that case i am putting her needs first over the embryo/fetus. I can certainly advise her of all of her options, but i will still support whatever she decides.
If your distressed sister wanted to kill herself would you help her? What if she wanted to kill her husband? If she wanted kill you, would you just kill yourself out of “empathy” for her?
If it was in self-defense against her husband, not sure maybe depending on the situation. Why do you pro-lifers always use extreme analogies, just because we don’t believe abortion is murder, does not mean we believe in free for all and think all killing is ok, that is why it is so difficult to have a dialog with pro-lifers, you assume all of pro-choicers just don’t value life at all, and that just because we approve of abortion means we agree to killing everyone and everybody, so absurd.
I’m glad you recognize the absurdity. I asked the questions assuming you would not consider these things. It is not relevant how you feel about these analogies ( you call them extreme), what matters is if they are accurate. If they are accurate, the extremeness of them should be a big clue.
Yeah but it a stawman analogy you brought up because you cannot argue the abortion issue on its own, you have to add other examples of killing that are not the same. You wrongly assume that they are equivalent and they are not, anybody that is reasonable and not a pro-life zealot would recognize that killing an autonomous individual is not the same as aborting an embryo that is not aware/sentient or have any thoughts, feelings or interests. So you tell me why an embryo should be elevated to have more rights than the pregnant woman?
I think you hit the nail on the head! Evangelicals seem to specialize in strawman analogies, slippery slopes, and false dichotomies. It’s rare that you’ll find an evangelical who will argue the merits and demerits of an issue without reverting to logical fallacies.
They don’t really believe abortion is the equivalent to killing an autonomous individual, they just want to enforce consequences on women that have sex, I don’t know why that is. Its like sex is the only consequence people should not be able to get out of, but other things yes, like smoking, gaining weight, using drugs. It is ok to get help or mitigate consequences for those things, but not pregnancy, it is all very hyprocritical
I agree. I think there are reasonable moral objections to abortion. But it’s no coincidence that the loudest voices opposing abortion are also the loudest voices promoting patriarchal gender roles. I suspect that it bothers some men that women have the legal freedom to decide when and with whom they will have sex.
If I reading you right, it seems you are suggesting that many pro life men deep down are only pro life because they wish they were free to rape women.
I’m not sure how you’re inferring that.
Read your last sentence in particular.
No, I’m merely remarking that many evangelical men promote a theology euphemistically called complementarianism that holds that women’s bodies are not their own possession, and are instead the possession of their fathers and/or husbands.
Abortion gives women greater freedom to experiment sexually, and that likely bothers a lot of men.
As we move from a patriarchal culture to a meritocratic culture, many downscale men feel insecure, and respond by seeking to take rights away from women. I don’t generally believe that it’s wise for women to elect to have an abortion. Even so, in the early stages of pregnancy, I don’t see the state’s interest as being sufficiently strong to warrant intrusion.
Besides, I’ve also noticed that the men who protest the loudest over things like abortion and homosexuality are themselves fairly insecure sexually.
That’s not at all what complementarianism means, it is simply that God does intend men and women to fulfill the same roles and purpose. The roles and purpose of men and women are different and complement each other.
In marriage, and this is explicitly stated no less, men and women share possession of each other. Wives have an ownership claim of their husbands body that is equal to the husband’s of her.
**I suspect that it bothers some men that women have the legal freedom to decide when and with whom they will have sex.**
I suspect that what bothers some men, is that they have such poor character and genes, that the only possibility of them passing on their genes is to get a woman to have sex with them when she is lonely or drunk, and then if a sperm gets lucky, force her to gestate even if she thinks better of the matter a few days later.
Both the unborn baby and the mother are living human beings. Why should only one of them have a right to remain a living human being?
unborn not autonomous, requires gestation and to occupy the body of another person. Just because it is living does not mean it has the right to occupy another person’s body without consent. Gestation can cause medical trauma and possible death. No one should be obligated to share the contents of their body with anybody by force, does that make sense to you. Just because you need my blood to live, does not mean you can take it from me by force just because you are a living being.
Just because something is living does not mean it has the right to take what it needs from another person to live, especially if it requires for it to live inside another person’s body. Pregnancy should be something someone consents to continue or not, not be forced by morality enforcers or pro-life zealots that equate a 5 week embryo that has no mind, no feeling, no brain, cannot live on its own to a newborn baby.
Both unborn and born babies are fully human beings. Why should this fact not matter? If your answer to that question is that the unborn baby requires the support of the mother’s body, the same is true of the born baby. If anything, the mother is less burdened when she support her baby inside her than outside of her. Born babies also cannot live on their own and require far more attention and caring for them is far more physically tiring.
Your “no mind, no feeling, no brain, cannot live on its own” are all arbitrary selected categories. To illustrate this, how about we add another category “won’t remember”. We don’t remember being 5 weeks post conception nor being 1 years old. I can easily come up with a set of criteria that could be used to “justify” killing infants and small children who if they are allowed to live to be adults won’t remember being infants and small children.
This way of arbitrary justification also ignores an important fact, you may be correct about the development of a 5 week unborn baby, but the simple fact is that by nature that baby will have a mind of its own, will feel, and will be living on it’s own. Why should this fact be ignored? Why should we judge whether someone is worthy of life based on where that person is at the moment as opposed to where they will be (let alone what they are, a human being)?
Also, to respond to the person who apologized for me. Which I respect their charitable way of handling this and also to reaching out to you. From my side, I respect your humanity, but to be blunt…I do not respect your views. Your view is intellectually, theologically, and morally indefensible. You may not a murderer in conduct, but you are a murderer at heart. I can’t take that lightly. You don’t have to answer to me for this, but if you are a Christian, you know the contents of your heart matter and that you are accountable to your Creator for them.
You can say that i am a murderer, well so are you, if you ever been angry at someone, every wished someone dead, than you are too? everyone is an adulterer too, if you have ever looked at another woman with lust , we are all guilty of sin before God. My views seem abhorrent to you because you equate a 5 week embryo to a newborn baby which it is not. The fact that an embryo has the potential to develop into a newborn does not mean that it is at that EXACT time. A baby outside the womb can be taken care of by anyone, an embryo/fetus cannot, it has to be gestated inside the body of another person.
If you think that is morally indefensible to take the side of a pregnant woman in distress over a an embryo that does NOT feel, think, even aware of its own existence, than so be it. I care about already born thinking feeling people more, God knows how i feel about this more than you and only God can judge what is in my heart on this issue.
I don’t take lightly that you disregard the life of the pregnant woman and pretend that she is invisible and loses her rights as a person as soon as she becomes pregnant and is now only an incubator, and that you think that she HAS to remain pregnant against her will if she wishes to terminate, so where is your compassion and empathy for her? that to you her life circumstances don’t matter to you, so i can say the same thing about your views being just as abhorrent.
I don’t tell pregnant women they have to abort, i respect people to make their own choice in this matter. You on the other hand want to take a choice away from women and possibly cause them hardship and feel good because it makes you supposedly morally superior.
You are a murderer at heart, and yes I have my own sins that I am accountable for.
Let me ask why do we not have funerals or death certificates for miscarriages? If they are persons we should have a funeral an death certificate made, don’t you think?
How do we know their isn’t an embryo being flushed down the toilet every month, when a woman has her period, their could be a tiny embryo in their that could be the size appleseed (is that a baby?)
Most abortions occur when the embryo is the size of an appleseed
By the way the definition of a murderer is having a malicious intent to do harm to someone. I have no such malicious intent to the unborn, I just put the woman’s rights first, it has nothing to do with malicious intent. It is about who I value more, the woman or the embryo, it is called hierarchy of value/rights.
You believe unborn babies should be killed, if that is not malicious intent, what is?
Also, the normal understanding of murder is taking the life of an innocent human being.
No i don’t believe a woman should be forced to gestate , which in turn an abortion is the only way to alleviate that. The unborn dies because it cannot live outside the womb, that is unfortunate, but it is not murder, anymore than you denying your kidney to a dying person. If the unborn are persons than why don’t we have funerals or death certifcates for miscarriages?
Im curious, do you think a woman who simply cannot find anyone who will help her kill her baby being forced to gestate? Im asking in part because I would like to understand just who you think is forcing women to gestate. I could understand this claim if it was common for women to be forced to become pregnant against their will (which would not justify baby murder, but would at least mean your claim had an obvious basis in reality). By and large, women choose to get pregnant by choosing to have sex.
forced to STAY pregnant if abortion is outlawed that is what I mean. Did not say become, I said STAY PREGNANT, against their will, is that clear enough for you?
Granted, I absolutely think baby murder should be outlawed. However, it is possible for baby murder to be legal and also for women to not be able to or at least have an exceedingly difficult time helping find someone willing to help them murder their baby. This was the possibility I was asking about. If abortion is a fundamental right as you have said, then it seems to me that ultimately, it would follow that we have a moral obligation to help women kill their babies and if no one is willing to fulfill their moral duty then the duty of the state is to make someone help women kill their babies. Ultimately, this is where I think the logic of your position goes, women have a right to kill their babies and that right includes the right to make someone help them kill their baby. Your position as you have argued for it really does not leave room for dissent or choice.
So maybe we have some kind of agreement, I don’t believe in forcing anyone to perform one or have one, just to leave it legal. Sure it may be difficult for some to find a doctor or clinic, and she may have to travel, that is fine. I DON’T advocate to make it EASIER, just to KEEP IT LEGAL.
i will not argue with you the semantics because you just want to believe an embryo a baby,when scientifically it is not, just like an egg is not a chick, but you have ignored that. You also never answered my question about miscarriages and funerals, you just dodged that?
their is not moral obligation to help anyone to have an abortion, helping someone or not should be a choice. Realistically speaking their will always be doctors even if not many that will perform an abortion or prescribe the abortion pill.
I don’t agree with evil. So no. Also, I don’t buy it for a moment that you would not flip out if by individual free will and no legal change no one would help a woman to kill her baby. Such a possibility just cannot be squared away with any positive and fundamental right to baby murder which you emphatically insist exists.
Your premise is false because in a free society, their will be somebody that will provide it, it may not be in my town, or i may have to drive 15 miles, so what? you can’t control people’s free will. You just want to outlaw it, and make impossible, so in reality you REFUSE to come to any common ground about this.
A right to something does not mean that it will be EASY to come by or that it should be paid by anyone. Its like saying that because i have the right to own a gun, you have to buy me one or sell me one, you are confusing a RIGHT with providing a SERVICE.
You keep playing games with your sad word ‘baby’. Tacking a sad word on an embryo does NOT mean that the embryo has the qualities that make killing an infant wrong.
If the ONLY quality necessary to be a ‘baby’ in your world view is to be made of mindless cells with speshul human DNA, then I would say that killing ‘babies’ is NOT inherently wrong, although killing ‘babies’ after a certain stage, with other, additional qualities beyond being merely mindless cells would be wrong.
Your claim is like claiming that since gold can be referred to as ‘atoms’ and all matter is made of ‘atoms’, therefore all matter should have a price of $1500/oz, because ‘If it isn’t atoms, what is it? And science doesn’t create the names for things like hydrogen and aluminum!’
You are an idiot. Go take a remedial reading course.
**However, it is possible for baby murder to be legal and also for women to not be able to or at least have an exceedingly difficult time helping find someone willing to help them murder their baby. This was the possibility I was asking about.**
So, basically you are admitting here that your real goal is not to eliminate abortion, but to make it a privilege only for the upper class. After all, we don’t want our special friends to be burdened with that inconvenient DS fetus, but we certainly can’t lose the next generation of cannon fodder, cheap labor, or let people with the wrong colored skin get out of the cycle of poverty, can we?
Thank you for your honesty.
**Im curious, do you think a woman who simply cannot find anyone who will help her kill her baby being forced to gestate?**
If you or others have done something to remove the possibility of anyone being able or willing to perform an abortion, then yes, she is being forced to gestate.
To understand this, let’s go back a few hundred years. If someone got appendicitis, they would die, and they were not being ‘forced’ to die, because the surgical knowledge to remove the appendix did not exist at that time. And nobody had taken any action to suppress the surgical knowledge, it simply had not been developed.
However, if TODAY, you were to do something, such as pass laws with draconian penalties for removing appendixes, or forbid the appendix removal to be taught in medical school, or kill all surgeons with the ability to remove an appendix, and someone got appendicitis after you had done any or all of those things, then yes, you WOULD be forcing them to die of appendicitis.
malicioous intent is hating and wishing them death or harm, so are incorrect. I only wish for a woman to be able to terminate her pregnancy if she so desires. The fact that the embryo dies is because it cannot live outside the womb that is unfortunate but it is not murder. Their is no way to transfer the embryo to another person to gestate it, does that make sense to you?
you keep trying to say that my motivation is killing babies, my motivation is for women to be free from pregnancy, but i guess you don’t want to believe that.
If I call an eggplant a ‘baby’, then is pulling it out ‘malicious’?
So, if you don’t want to donate blood, does that mean you have ‘malicious intent’ towards precious, innocent accident victims, and must be forced to donate?
oh by the way the definition of baby is this:
” a very young child, especially one newly or recently born,”
this is from the dictionary. A baby is an already born child, an embryo is a developing human not yet a baby.
definition of an embryo:
Embryo: An organism in the early stages of growth and differentiation, from fertilization to the beginning of the third month of pregnancy (in humans).
hope that makes sense to you.
Don’t care. Normal people refer to their unborn children as babies and not fetuses or embryos. My use of the word baby is entirely appropriate within the normal pattern and understanding of the English language.
More so, what you call it is irrelevant. It’s moral status as a human being made in God’s image is the same whether one calls them an embryo, fetus, or baby. This moral status, it’s humanity, is the only thing that matters here.
so should we call eggs chicks? after all when it hatches a chick comes out which is a baby chicken. I am assuming that you are going to stop eating eggs now because they are baby chicks. So i guess reality does not matter to you and proper scientific terms don’t either, because it does not fit your agenda of forced gestation.
My view is not based on “proper scientific terms” it is instead based on the nature of that being in a woman’s womb.
You also must not recall that I have a new baby and at no point did we call our baby a fetus or embryo. No one else did either.
just because you call it a baby does not make it a baby. The terms I used are scientifically accurate, I thought pro-life people believed in science. I keep reading articles of them saying that they have science on their side. My analogy above is correct, and egg is not a chick, but I guess according to you an egg IS a chick, so you are eating a baby chick when you eat eggs. An embryo is not a baby just because you say it is.
This is just stupid.
You dismiss it because you refuse to acknowlege scientific facts, and you don’t want to address difficult concepts and or questions that might not fit your narrative, like you never answered my question about funerals for miscarriages and the possibilty of an embryo miscarrying in a menstruation , and why those deaths don’t matter to you are are not important? I thought you wanted to have an intellectual discussion?
Scientific terms are not scientific facts. Science is not used to discover the correct name for something.
You don’t know much about language, do you?
so basically you are saying, embryos that die during a miscarriage are not persons because we don’t have funerals and we don’t issue death certificates, (so we are in agreement), but embryos that die during an abortion ARE persons? is that right?
No, I am saying they are human beings period.
So, according to you, an acorn is an oak tree, period. Therefore, if your kids come and stomp on an acorn in my yard, you owe me $3000, which is the value of lumber in a mature tree. Right?
He never answered my question about why we don’t have funerals or issue death certificates for miscarriages, i get cricketts
Because it isn’t relevant, social practices are not the issue here. Funerals don’t make something human.
then you agree with me embroyos are not babies and they are not persons, because we have funerals for PERSONS and BABIES.
it is not irrelevent to the discussion because we are talking about the death of an embryo whether it be by an abortion or miscarriage, and whether or not they are PERSONS, which they are not
or else we would issue them death certificates like we do now for born people when they die.
I have said clearly that I am completely and totally disappointed in the intellectual integrity of your reasoning. Your arguments have been circular and incoherent, which I have explained previously. This argument you are making is just straight up stupid. The conclusion of not a human because no funeral just doesn’t follow. It does not even come close to following.
Now I am getting a forced birther who is claiming that zygotes are human, because they have human DNA, but that acorns are not oak trees, even though they have the full complement of oak DNA, because reasons.
The forced birther’s are really such idiots, they dodge questions and deny scientific facts, if it doesn’t fit their agenda.
I have never met such an obtuse group as the forced birthers. I don’t have a college education, but I actually UNDERSTAND your concepts and arguments very well. The forced birthers really either don’t understand bodily autonomy or they don’t care. I think they are deliberately obtuse, its like talking to a wall.
**I have never met such an obtuse group as the forced birthers.**
The Christian author CS Lewis once wrote ‘The problem with trying to make yourself stupider than you already are is that you very often succeed.’. This was in reference to someone who did not want to believe that a lion (Aslan) was singing. Soon, he could not hear it singing, and shortly after that he would not have been able to hear it, even if he had WANTED to.
The forced birthers do not want to believe that the human mind has value. Which is why they are so obtuse – anything that contradicts that must be handwaved away.
Which brings us to another point regarding something CS Lewis had to say in one of his books. Some evil people were trying to pretend that Aslan (God) and Tash (Satan) were the same thing, and said that “Aslan means neither more nor less than Tash”.
They were then asked by a talking cat: “Especially Aslan means no more than Tash?” To which the response was: “No more at all.”
And what did all that mean? Basically, that in their view of things, there was no such entity as EITHER Aslan OR Tash.
Which is pretty much the argument of the forced birthers. They claim that the zygote is neither more no less valuable than a newborn infant. By which they mean, they don’t really place any value on EITHER zygote OR infants, other than their use in punishing people for having sex.
Eventually , you will probably notice that the forced birthers divide into two sorts.
The first sort worships the ‘zero’. They gasp in awe of cute mindlessness, and of the sort of ‘innocence’ which is defined by mindlessness.
The second sort is far worse. They worship the negative. Their definition of a ‘human being’ is: Whatever is most likely to cause suffering to thinking, feeling people INCLUDING the baby itself when it is able to think and feel. For instance, they object to possibly curing genetic diseases by replacing a defective gene. According to them, this would constitute ‘killing the baby’ and ‘replacing it with a different baby’. The ‘baby’ or ‘human being’ in this case, apparently being located in, and ONLY in one single defective gene (out of the 25-30,000 genes that exist in our species).
You will also notice the second sort in Catholic hospitals. The embryo is all-sacred and human, and requires blood sacrifices from the mother in the form of having her fallopian tube removed if she commits the horrible sin of having an ectopic pregnancy. Or at least, it’s all-sacred until it’s purpose in mutilating the mother is complete. Once the fallopian tube (with the embryo in it) is removed, the previously all-sacred embryo morphs into trash and is thrown in the dumpster with the rest of the medical waste.
Please explain how it follows that if one believes that human beings are inherently valuable that it follows that they must believe that human minds are not in order to hold logically consistent views?
Unless you believe bacteria have rights, if you think mindless cells are ‘inherently valuable’ because of speshul human DNA, then it follows that the human mind does not have value to you. If it did, then thinking humans would of necessity have more value than mindless embryoes.
The cells in question compromise a human being. A bacteria is not a human being. Your argument is stupid. If human being are inherently valuable, then it follows that attributes of humanity such as having a mind are also valuable. The problem with your thinking is that not all humans have equal mental capacity. Nor physical capacity for that matter. What we all share in equal is humanity itself. Hence the focus here on what we all share together equally instead of human attributes such as mind in which some are more equal than others.
**If human being are inherently valuable, then it follows that attributes of humanity such as having a mind are also valuable**
Unfortunately, you have it backwards. Human beings are valuable BECAUSE OF THEIR ATTRIBUTES.
**The problem with your thinking is that not all humans have equal mental capacity.**
The problem with your sob is that while some humans are smarter than others, ALMOST all of them have minds of some sort. Your trying to sneak the mindless zef in doesn’t work, it’s rather as if you were to point out that since some TV’s have 80 inch screens and some have 1″ screens, therefore something with NO screen at all is still a TV.
**What we all share in equal is humanity itself.**
Which has no ‘inherent value’ without the attributes.
** Hence the focus here on what we all share together equally instead of human attributes**
I’m sure you WOULD like to ‘focus’ on that, since it lets you sneak the zef in. But it has no ‘inherent value’ without all the attributes.
I do understand bodily autonomy, I asked you to define it and you did. You said it is the “right to abortion”. Which I understand means that women should be free to murder their babies/terminate their pregnancies. I have asked you for any reason or evidence to believe a right to “bodily autonomy” exists, which you have claimed is an inherent/fundamental right in so many words, a right that ought to be protected so to speak as opposed to a right that society should be free to grant or not grant. You have failed to come up with anything.
Also, the science is settled, there is no scientific evidence that casts any doubt on the full humanity of the unborn from the very moment of conception onwards. There is not even reason to believe any such evidence will ever be discovered. This science is literally as settled as science gets, it’s as settled as 2+2=4 or the earth being round is settled.
I already explained it to you, but you don’t comprehend the concept. Bodily autonomy refers to the right to not have to donate organs, or have anything INSIDE your body you do NOT WISH. So denying by law an abortion is VIOLATING a woman’s right to her body to FREE FROM PREGNANY, IF SHE SO WISHES.
We have that right now as it stands, that is why you CANNOT be forced to donate blood or your bone marrow, because we can’t USE or take anything from your body by force.
yes this right should be protected, so that YOU cannot be forced to give blood, and I cannot be FORCED to stay pregnant.
You are delibertly being obtuse, I don’t know how much clearer can it be. The right to an abortion is settled for now because a woman CANNOT be forced to CONTINUE A PREGANCY AGAINST HER WILL.
does this make sense you NOW?
Yes, women should be free to not have sex so that they don’t get pregnant. You continually ignore the obvious solution here. I am as against forced pregnancies as you are if not more so.
I have asked multiple times for any evidence or reason to believe that this right to “bodily autonomy” exists. It looks like some “right” that you just made up and cobbled together by randomly throwing in organ donation along with baby murder. Babies are human beings, not organs.
The “right to abortion” is settled for now because people are selfish and wicked. Some so wicked they would literally rip a babies limbs off and crush it’s skull. These monsters belong in jail cell. This “right” belongs you worship in the dustbin of history along with the evils of slavery and genocide.
The right exists look it up, that is why you cannot be forced to donate blood or donate organs. I cannot help that you are ignorant to the laws about using our bodies without consent, even prisoners in jail have this right.
I am not talking about how to avoid pregnancy, again I am discussing what to do AFTER A WOMAN IS ALREADY PREGNANT, you keep changing the subject. A woman that is ALREADY pregnant and wishes not to be, according to you she MUST REMAIN pregnant with no recourse because you find it morally repugnant for her to have an abortion. I get it, I just disagree because I believe a woman still has RIGHTS even AFTER SHE BECOMES PREGNANT!
just so you know most abortions in the 4-5 weeks of pregnancy occur with the abortion pill, which causes a miscarriage, NO LIMBS ARE TORN, NO SKULLS ARE CRUSHED, the embryo comes out INTACT from the uterus.
Yes, women still have rights even when pregnant. They have the same set of fundamental rights all human beings have. Why would you think anyone is saying differently?
Just because babies can be murdered more cleanly at 4-5 weeks does not make the act any less murderous and evil.
not if we had it your way, because you want to take a way a woman’s right to terminate a pregnancy, so you basically want to FORCE her to stay pregnant even if against her will, so she has lost rights to control her body, due to getting pregnant, that is they way you and all of you pro-lifers want to IMPOSE.
Im curious, how would you suggest a woman exercise this right to terminate a pregnancy without any help? Perhaps beat herself?
Their are herbs and things that women have always taken in the past, though not always successfully, which in turn can be dangerous and may require medical attention, which if abortion were to be illegal, could possibly lead to the woman being charged with a crime, does that answer your question?
Is that acceptable to you that women be charged with a crime if abortion is banned for self-aborting at home?
Ok, so your position is that this “right to terminate a pregnancy” a fundamental right. Yet, in order to exercise it, a mother would have to harm herself. What kind of right is it that requires self harm, and potentially serious self harm at that, to exercise?
I don’t think mother’s should kill their babies and accordingly I don’t think they should be able to get help killing their babies so that they limit the harm inflicted on themselves. The very fact that more likely than not serious self harm is required to exercise this “right” is itself a powerful argument against it being a right at all. This so even if we disregard the argument that the goal of exercising this right is to make a living human being dead.
Yes, that may be acceptable depending on the circumstances, in 2017 it is not likely that any such circumstances would occur because it is not likely the mother would really understand what she was trying to do. Abortionist’s not so much, yes, they should be charged and yes we should imprison them. It will be a good day when not only groups like Planned Parenthood are merely defunded, but when much of the organization is rounded up, charged, tried, convicted, and locked up.
oh so you think women are stupid and don’t know what they are doing, so according to you they should not be charged with a crime? If abortion is murder according to you, the woman should be charged with 1st degree murder, don’t shy away from that, be consistent. After all it is the woman that seeks the abortion. You just don’t like the implications of what banning abortion would look like.
If you think for a minute that a woman going to the hospital for a miscarriage would not be suspected of self-aborting, if abortion were Illegal, OF COURSE it would happen, don’t think doctors, hospitals want to be breaking the law for not informing the authorities of ILLEGAL abortions happening now.
Another thing, you probably, don’t think about is how this would create a wonderful black market of abortion, study 1920’s prohibition, you will see what I am talking about. If you think for a minute that unwanted pregnancies will all of sudden become wanted because it is illegal, then you really are an idiot, and are really naïve about human nature.
I think it is entirely fair to say that whether or not a murder took place depends on the circumstances. That is how it works in every other situation. There is no lack of consistency involved in holding the same standards when the dead human was unborn. Nor any reason to dislike the implications of it were illegal for mother’s to murder their unborn children (which as an aside, it already is legally murder if someone else intentionally kills an unborn baby).
We have legal safe guards in place already, the beyond reasonable doubt standard would ensure that a woman who had a miscarriage would not have anything to worry about. It is possible that some may suspect she intentionally killed her child, but it would not be ultimately legally actionable. Which is no different than today, people can still suspect a woman killed her baby instead of miscarrying. The mere possibility of a false accusation or even false conviction is not a reason for anything else to be made legal. No sane person would suggest that murder be made legal full stop in order to ensure no one innocent person is convicted and executed.
As for the black market, so what? Would I want that? No, of course not, but the fears of a black market just is not reason to make something legal. Otherwise, we might as well make it legal to hire a hitman.
Look, none of these horrors you cite even comes to the reality of abortion which has left tens of millions humans dead and counting. No way that number keeps rising as rapidly if it were not legal for mother’s to murder their unborn.
Gladys, forced birthers are immature children. They never think through the results of what they propose to the end, they merely congratulate themselves on deciding that ‘SOMETHING MUST BE DONE’.
A right to expect consequence free sex and to escape parental responsibilities is the definition of childish.
why not, we mitigate consequences all the time for all sorts of things, why is this one different?
Maybe this isjust about trying enforce a CERTAIN Consequence, tell me what is wrong with consequence free sex, does that bother you?
What’s wrong with it is that most of them aren’t getting any sex. So they are jealous.
And, btw, they are not the only ones who do not think things through to the end. As someone interested in snakes as a pet, I have seen the tragic results of the failure to think things through to the end in that area to.
What happens basically is: Someone wants to get a pet snake. They want a baby snake, so they can raise it to be familiar with them, but they do NOT want something the size of a shoestring, they want something they can pick up and play with easily immediately.
Unfortunately, in order to get a ‘baby’ snake of a fairly big size, you have to get a ‘baby’ snake of a large species, such as a reticulated python. So, they have their cute, big ‘baby’ for a couple of years. Then it grows to be about 15-20 feet long, they lack the facilities to house it properly and it eats $1000 worth of rabbits a year.
Result, they dump it in a shelter out in the country somewhere. If the latter, depending on where they live, it either dies when winter comes, or survives, breeds, and becomes an ecological problem.
So let me ask you, you would rather a woman die or be seriously harmed from a self abortion, if made illegal, than for her to have a proper one done under supervision? you say i am ice cold, I hope that never happens to a loved one of yours.
Look I get it, you believe that a woman who becomes pregnant HAS TO STAY PREGNANT, and give birth, even if she WISHES NOT TO CONTINUE being pregnant. You believe that she should not have any recourse, and be DENIED an abortion . I understand that you will not bend on this issue because you believe abortion is morally repugnant, it get your position.
I just disagree with , I see this differently, I see that is as the woman’s interests outweigh the embryo , you say NO, I find YOUR POSITION EQUALLY MORALLY REPUGNANT, that you would deny a woman a right to end her pregnancy, and whatever hardship and difficulties a pregnancy can be on the woman. You disregard that.
I was hoping to come to some common ground on this issue, i was hoping you would try to commiserate with pregnant women, but you don’t. I
at the very least will CONCEDE to you that i do believe in restrictions on abortions after 2nd trimester. Most abortions do occur at 4-6 weeks, late term abortions occur mostly for medical reasons.
What common ground did you hope to arrive at?
Gladys, a very good rule of thumb when dealing with the sort of word frauds that forced birthers like to pull, is to ALWAYS take them literally.
Do not let them take advantage of YOUR virtue to make their frauds work, by adding (or taking away) elements of your own, to their word definitions, before making a judgement on them.
For instance, if they define a ‘human being’ as needing to be nothing more than a single mindless cells, and THEN ask you ‘don’t you think human beings have value?’
Do NOT mentally add a brain to their definition. That is what they are counting on, your own virtue (or fear of audience opinion) to make their fraud work. They themselves specified the brain need not be there. Comply with exactly that. Picture a mindless cell, or Khal Drogo (from Game of Thrones), and answer the question based on THAT – and always specifying every time for the audience that the value – or lack thereof – is based on the forced birther definition of ‘human being’ as mindless cells without a brain.
Yes, take Ann’s advice and don’t mentally add a brain. I am in full agreement with this. We really are saying that from the moment of conception even when just a single cell that that is a full human being. There is no reason to add anything to it.
Don’t listen to Ann about mindless cells, strictly speaking, all cell’s are mindless.
And what exactly IS there in his definition of a ‘full human being’ without a mind, that contains any value? Without a mind, why should we have more value than a bacteria? Did God spin a roulette wheel and ‘human beings’ came up on top, for no good reason, and it could just as easily have been squirrels or yeast that God declared had ‘value’ for no particular reason?
As for all cells being mindless, there’s another weasel. While all cells are mindless, some cells, in groups, sustain a mind. But not all. He is trying to elevate the embryo by lowering thinking, feeling human beings again. His argument is like claiming that since all atoms are made of protons, neutrons, and electrons, therefore aluminum should be valued as much as gold.
God made human beings in His image. This was a purposeful, intentional, meaningful act. God knew exactly what he was doing. Your comment shows you misunderstand both the nature of God and the nature of man.
Then God should have made abortions impossible. He did not do so. Since you insist he know what he was doing, we can only assume he intended for abortions to sometimes happen.
Forced birther? Could you at least coin a term that corresponds to reality? You really are advocating for babies to be violently murdered, their limbs torn off and their skulls crushed. Calling you baby murderers fits. No one who is against what you advocate for believes women should be forced to get pregnant.
Also, intentionally misrepresenting arguments is unbecoming of any adult. No one is saying that unborn babies are fully human just because they have human dna. Human skin cells have human DNA and those are not fully human (just a very small part of a human). Instead we are simply pointing out that unborn babies are living, developing individual human beings *exactly* like we are. That unborn baby has it’s own body, it’s parts and systems are working together, it is organized. It is not just some clump of random cells thrown together from which a human may or may never emerge.
forced birther is correct because you want to FORCE women to STAY pregnant, which in turn forces her to give BIRTH. Just so you know in 1st trimester abortions no skulls are crushed no limbs torn off, the embryo comes out INTACT with the abortion pill, it is the size of a peanut. You want to give an embryo MORE rights than the mother. So yes Force birther fits the correctly the description of what banning abortion would do, is FORCE WOMEN TO STAY PREGNANT
You’re funny. Human beings are fully human from conception. An acorn is not a tree. You are committing a category error here.
** Human beings are fully human from conception. An acorn is not a tree. **
I beg your pardon!? An acorn is en embryo tree. It has the entire full DNA of whatever species of oak it belongs to. If a zygote is ‘fully human’ then an acorn is most certainly ‘fully a tree’.
**You are committing a category error here.**
You need several years of remedial botany classes.
Acorns have the DNA of tree but they are not living, developing trees. They are mere vessels that under the condition could sprout into trees. If those conditions are not met, they will continue to acorns. Unborn babies are living and developing human beings. They are not at all comparable to seeds. It is you who has committed the category error here.
**Acorns have the DNA of tree but they are not living, developing trees. **
Go take several years of remedial botany.
**You also must not recall that I have a new baby and at no point did we call our baby a fetus or embryo.**
Well if you think that proves it was never a fetus or embryo, problem solved. It can be taken out at 6 weeks.
No matter what you call it, we have already proved an unborn baby is as human as we are. Why are you so caught up in terminology?
If your definition of ‘human’ consists of being mindless cells with speshul human DNA, you are correct. But the problem is, there is nothing in THAT definition to make me think that ‘killing’ it would be inherently immoral.
The reason I am ‘caught up in terminology’ is the same reason you are frantic to evade that terminology and use vague terms. Specifically, you want to conflate the mindless cells with speshul human DNA with OTHER ‘human’ beings that DO have a mind.
Sorry, not going to let you play that game. Isn’t it just sad that I have too high a reading level to fall for your equivocation fallacies and fallacies of vagueness?
You have a high reading level and yet you say “speshul”. Not buying it.
I am not going to try to convince you that it is inherently wrong to murder human beings. If you don’t already believe that you are a moral monster period. You need help.
**You have a high reading level and yet you say “speshul”. Not buying it.**
So, basically you know so little about writing, that you assume that an author who deliberately uses mis-spellings to portray sarcasm, or the point of view of a fiction character they are writing who is illiterate, is therefore illiterate themselves. I suppose you also think that Stephen King believes in killing children, because he has written characters in his books who have done so.
Suggestion – do not take courses in creative writing in the future. You are too stupid to be an author.
**I am not going to try to convince you that it is inherently wrong to murder human beings. If you don’t already believe that you are a moral monster period. You need help.**
Again, your trying to conflate human beings with minds and mindless embryoes. I believe it is wrong to kill a human MIND. The fact that at our current stage in development all human minds exist inside living human bodies and that it is wrong to kill such bodies because it also kills the mind in them does not automatically make it wrong to kill bodies without minds. You need to make a better case, other than sobbing about how the same broad term can apply to both states.
And no, the fact that I see through your word games, or fail to gasp in awe of mindless cells does not mean I need ‘help’.
if scientific terms don’t matter to you, then i hope you don’t use medical science to treat any illness or disease because you don’t care about proper scientific terms or facts.
This is even more stupid. Are you even trying or just trolling for kicks?
No, she’s exposing your fallacies of vagueness, whereby you try to project a mental image of a thinking, feeling infant and conflate it with a mindless embryo by the deliberate use of very broad terms like ‘baby’.
If you were not trying to confuse an infant with an embryo, you would not be frantic about NOT using specific terms. Those who object to specific terms are attempting to be dishonest.
Case in point, if someone were to try to sell me a garter snake, and got frantic about my insisting that they tell me if it was Thamnophis Sirtalis or Thamnophis Infernalis, and used your lame excuses that ‘nobody calls them Sirtalis or Infernalis, everyone calls them ‘garter snakes’, I would know they were trying to rip me off (The latter sells for far more than the former).
Your sob about what ‘everyone calls them’ may apply to affectionate, private family situations, but it is indicative of deliberate dishonesty in a public debate forum.
Not using the words you think I should use is not a logical fallacy. Nor is it all vague. Calling an unborn baby an unborn that is fully human conceals no facts. No one is confused by that term.
**Not using the words you think I should use is not a logical fallacy**
No, not using the words I think you should use is not, in and of itself, necessarily a logical fallacy.
However, insisting on using broad terms and that what applies to objects with certain qualities that can be referred to by that term must therefore ALSO apply to objects without those qualities, or with different qualities, for no reason other than the fact that both objects can be referred to by the same broad term IS a fallacy of vagueness/equivocation. And it is a logical fallacy whether I ‘think’ you should use the specific terms or not.
Unborn babies, babies, toddlers, children, teenagers, young adults, adults, middle aged, the old, the elderly are all fully human. All belong in the category of human being. It is that simple.
** All belong in the category of human being.**
The problem is, there is absolutely NOTHING in your particular definition of ‘human being’ that contains any actual value.
I’m not going to play the game of first granting value to a ‘human being’ under ONE definition of the word, namely that of thinking, feeling people, then have you sneak the zef in, when the zef does not have the qualities of thinking and feeling, and demand that I grant IT equal value, because you can slap the label ‘human being’ on it.
Either ‘human beings’ have thoughts and feeling, or they don’t. If they don’t, then there is nothing under that definition to grant value. It is that simple.
Unborn babies, being that they are fully human, are the type of beings that can think and feel. They share both attributes with us born, adult humans equally. By every measure they are fully human.
the problem is that an embryo at 5-6 weeks does NOT feel or think, (when most abortions occur) newborn babies do.
an embryo developing is like a vegetable, that is why their value is lower than a full term baby. A woman’s life rights are more valuable, than an embryo at that stage of development, that has no mind, no feeling, no wishes and cannot feel pain, that is the point that Ann and I are trying to convey.
When you weight out the interests of the embryo and the pregnant woman, her INTEREST should come FIRST.
I’m sorry, but you do realise that fetuses have no brain function, therefore do not think or feel until 22-25 weeks.
Take remedial embryology along with remedial botany.
Have you not said you have a high reading comprehension? I said the unborn are the type of beings that can think and feel. To up the ante, they are also the type of beings that can love and laugh, run and play, and learn and develop skills, knowledge, and talents. This is so because they are human beings, and these attributes that are inherent to being human.
**This is so because they are human beings, and these attributes that are inherent to being human.**
You are weaselling and trying to avoid the question with pretended stupidity about the fact that an acorn contains an embryo oak tree.
So I am going to remove your weasel, and expose your lies for all the world to see.
New thought experiment. Instead of crushing acorns, let’s say the acorns have sprouted and are now 1 inch tall and growing. They are now living, growing plants, thus removing your frantic weasel that the acorn is not an oak tree because it isn’t growing (your babble about it not being living is provably false).
The 1″ oak sprouts are the type of plants that will grow 100 feet tall and have $3000 worth of wood. These attributes are ‘inherent to being oak trees’.
This being the case, if your children come and stomp on the 1″ tall sprouts and crush them, are you willing to pay me $3000 per sprout?
The $3000 value of oak wood from a tree is not inherent at all. It is instead created by the market activity of human beings. As such it is contingent on human beings and human activity. The value of a human being, in contrast, is *not* contingent on anything humans do.
** The value of a human being, in contrast, is *not* contingent on anything humans do.**
Really? So if tomorrow, all human beings were to suddenly have their brains fall out and be reduced to the intelligence level of bacteria, and have our genes altered so that all future generations would be born that way, we would still magically have ‘value’? Because fetus.
Sorry, but we value human beings because they have specific properties that we VALUE. Just as we value oak trees, because it has specific properties that we value. You demand that ‘human beings’ be valued WITHOUT those properties, because they are ‘inherent’, or will be developed at maturity. So I demand the same of oak sprouts. The value of an oak sprout is ‘inherent’. It will eventually get lumber.
And yes, the value of a human being IS contingent on something we do. Specifically, growing a brain of a particular caliber. If we did not do that, we would not have value.
You are an idiot.
What do you think your hypothetical proves? I suspect you think it illustrates that what is really valuable is human intelligence. However, your hypothetical posits changing human nature. These new beings would not be truly human at all and would lack the inherent value of humanity accordingly.
“Sorry, but we value human beings because they have specific properties that we VALUE”
This statement is essentially circular, you are basically saying human beings are valuable because human beings value human beings.
I am not demanding that human beings are inherently valuable, I am stating it as a fact.
“And yes, the value of a human being IS contingent on something we do. Specifically, growing a brain of a particular caliber. If we did not do that, we would not have value.”
Granted it is a natural process and not something someone does, but the brains of unborn babies are growing and/or developing. Same is true of born babies, and children and even adults. Growing a brain is also not exactly contingent, it is part of human nature. Human beings just are the type of beings that by nature have brains…and eyes and hearts and hands and feet. The existence of these features is not contingent on any human activity or choices. It’s not good when even your own argument ultimately works against your position.
**I suspect you think it illustrates that what is really valuable is human intelligence. However, your hypothetical posits changing human nature. These new beings would not be truly human at all and would lack the inherent value of humanity accordingly.**
But the problem with that sob, is if I changed the nature of human beings in some other way, say, I turned everyone in the world into 6’ tall rabbits with human minds, we would all STILL have value. There is no ‘inherent value’ of humanity. Only of the human mind.
“Sorry, but we value human beings because they have specific properties that we VALUE”
**This statement is essentially circular, you are basically saying human beings are valuable because human beings value human beings.**
No, I’m saying human beings are valuable if and only if they have specific qualities we value, and we would value the same qualities in non-human beings.
**I am not demanding that human beings are inherently valuable, I am stating it as a fact.**
Unfortunately, your fact doesn’t hold up to examination. Partly because it is the mind we value, partly because there is no such thing as ‘inherent’ value. Value is NOT an ‘inherent’ property like mass or electrical charge. All value is subjective.
“And yes, the value of a human being IS contingent on something we do. Specifically, growing a brain of a particular caliber. If we did not do that, we would not have value.”
**Granted it is a natural process and not something someone does, but the brains of unborn babies are growing and/or developing. Same is true of born babies, and children and even adults. Growing a brain is also not exactly contingent, it is part of human nature. Human beings just are the type of beings that by nature have brains…and eyes and hearts and hands and feet. The existence of these features is not contingent on any human activity or choices.**
The same is true of lumber. Growing lumber is a natural process that oak trees do by nature. The existence of the feature of growing lumber is not contingent on human choice. And you are trying to elevate the embryo again, by comparing it to born infants, who have actual brain function. Growing WITHOUT function is a different state than growing WITH function.
But the point you miss is – VALUING is contingent on human choice. People CHOOSE to value lumber, and to value the human mind. And yes, both have market value. You want proof? How about this thought experiment:
A billionaire has his 5 year old kidnapped. The kidnappers demand $10 million in ransom.
Assuming he knows for sure that he will get his child back safely if he pays, and contrawise, the child will be first tortured, then killed if he doesn’t pay, do you think most billionaires would pay?
Now – let’s say the kidnappers snatch his precious frozen zygote out of a fertility clinic and demand $10 million or they throw it in the fire. Think any billionaire would pay?
Or let’s say the billionaire has access to some super-advanced technology, whereby he can remotely ‘erase’ his child’s mind from the kidnapped child and ‘redownload’ it into an identical clone. And he does that. Think he’ll now pay $10 million for breathing, mindless meat?
You are a liar and don’t understand economics. You are demanding that the human fetus and ONLY the human fetus be given magical infinite value despite having none of the qualities that create value.
i love this analogy about the billionaire and the zygote
You use many words to basically say in your view human beings have no inherent value, certainly are not infinitely valuable, but instead the value of a human being is derived by the market forces of human activity and desires.
So, Im curious, since you pass yourself off as at least someone who understands economics, please tell me the value in U.S dollars of:
-The least valuable human being in the world
-Yourself
-Me (based on what you can reasonably assume)
-The most valuable human being in the world
Just off the top of your head ballparking these numbers is fine, but if you want to use your economic expertise to do more research all the better. I am not asking this question rhetorically, I am asking you to directly answer. No dodging, no pretending this is not what you are really saying. None of that, just a direct, simple answer in US dollars. ASAP please.
**You use many words to basically say in your view human beings have no inherent value,**
No, we don’t. ‘Value’ is not an ‘inherent property, like mass hardness or density or electrical charge. If you take a box with a man and a box with a pig and throw them both into a wood chipper, the wood chipper is not suddenly going to stop because the man is more ‘valuable’. But it may stop if you throw a piece of hard metal in. Metal is hard whether you agree it is or not. Human beings – or anything else – has value only in so much as most people agree. The woodchipper does not agree.
**certainly are not infinitely valuable, but instead the value of a human being is derived by the market forces of human activity and desires.**
It’s derived from human desires, insomuch as we value things with certain properties. We (most of us) value rarity, beauty, and hardness, which is why we value diamonds greatly. Most of us value intelligence. Not very many of us place a high valuation on mindless cells, regardless of what we claim.
**So, Im curious, since you pass yourself off as at least someone who understands economics, please tell me the value in U.S dollars of:**
-The least valuable human being in the world
-Yourself
-Me (based on what you can reasonably assume)
-The most valuable human being in the world**
That depends on who is doing the valuation, and how much money they would pay to either obtain or preserve the particular person in question.
**No dodging, no pretending this is not what you are really saying.**
The problem here first of all, is that ‘value’ is not always measures in ‘dollars’. The ‘value’ of a human being would only be measured in ‘dollars’ in certain situations. You are asking a straw man question.
There are other forms of ‘value’.
A good example is sex. All women (and all men, too) want some sort of value in exchange for sex. Sometimes what they want is dollars. Sometimes what they want is a man with a hot body, or a good set of genes to pass to their children, or an orgasm, or emotional satisfaction. Making it fairly important. btw, to find out what sort of coin a woman (or man) is after, and not offer her/him the wrong sort.
How much you ‘value’ something is basically measured in: How much are you willing to give up (of whatever) in order to obtain and/or preserve whatever or whoever it is?
That answer is going to depend on which human being you are asking, and which human being it is being asked about. In a lot of cases, what you have to give up, to ‘obtain’ a particular person, in terms of having a relationship, is TIME. If you want your children or your girlfriend/boyfriend to actually have a relationship with you, you need to spend TIME with them. Not that you might not enjoy doing so, but it is TIME you are giving up, time that COULD be spent doing other things.
In terms of dollars, human beings are usually not up for sale, thus requiring particular scenarios to put a dollar value on them. Kidnapping works well. How much would someone pay to get back their kidnapped child? How much would someone pay to get THEMSELVES out of a snuff for money (Hostel 2) scenario? How much would someone pay to rescue Bill Gates or Donald Trump? How much would someone pay to rescue Charles Manson?
Like it or not, we value some ‘human beings’ more than others. Case in point, about a month ago, I gave a friend of mine a decent amount of money to help him with some dental issues he was having. The same amount of money could have kept a 3rd world child alive for a year. So yes, I value the ‘mere convenience’ of my personal friend more than the ‘very life’ of a 3rd world child.
Most people place a certain amount of value even on the life of a homeless person, such that we are willing to spend X amount of tax dollars on homeless shelters, and having the police spend a few hours investigating their murder.
I brought up the kidnapping scenario of the kidnapped zygote to illustrate a point. NOBODY has a gasping in awe valuation of zygotes, regardless of their pretense to the contrary. We know this, because NOBODY is going to pay 10 million for a ‘kidnapped’ frozen zygote.
Which brings me to another point.
Forced birthers do not actually value zygotes, regardless of all their sobs.
VALUE is measured in terms of what you are willing to give up YOURSELF, to either obtain, or preserve the safety of something in question.
Forced birthers are not willing to give up ANYTHING to preserve the safety of the all-sacred zygote. They merely demand that OTHERS do so.
They may think they value the precious little zygote, but they don’t. Or else they have a 3 year old’s concept of ‘valuing’ something, which consists of throwing tantrums and whining ‘But I WAAAANT a puppy!!’ or ‘I WAAANT to have a fetal fantasy’.
I had a more mature concept of value, when I was 7. I found a baby bird (a grackle), that had fallen out of the nest. I wanted to take care of it and make it live. My neighbor thought I was the typical ‘BUT I WAAANT!’ child and told my parents to give the bird to her to care for.
Instead, they let me keep it. They gave me a shovel, and told me to start digging for worms to feed it.
Digging is not easy for a 7 year old. Neither is feeding a bird every hour, on the hour (baby birds need to be fed very frequently). But I gave up time and work, and kept the bird alive until it grew up and eventually flew away.
Because I actually VALUED the bird.
Forced birthers do not actually value the fetus. They just throw tantrums like a 3 year old who wants a puppy, but the ‘sacrifices’ of work are for everyone else. The moment something, anything is asked of forced birthers to help keep the ‘precious babies’ alive, they are nowhere to be seen.
And, btw, the issue with helping my friend with his dental problems rather than spending the money for the ‘very lives’ of third world children brings up a very central point.
Which is that resources, in particular, money, are not infinite for most people. They may have to make hard decisions, decisions they may not much like, on how to spend that money. Several years ago, my family had to make the decision to have our cat, which had been badly injured, put to sleep. Why? Because the surgery would have cost several thousand dollars. We don’t have that kind of money to spare, and as much as we loved our cat, the people come first.
What you forced birthers want, is to demand that people allocate their economic resources in the way YOU say, always on the ‘very life’ of the fetus. You don’t get to say that. It’s not your money. There are parents who have actually made the decision to discontinue medical care of children with incurable diseases (causing them to die faster), because they felt the money would be better spent on their healthy children. And those are THINKING, FEELING children. Yet you presume to demand that parents must spend money on the ‘very life’ of DS fetuses, rather than the college education of their born children. Just who do you think you are that you should get to dictate decisions like that for other people?
How about this: You show up with the money for the ‘very life’ of all these fetuses, along with an agreement to care for them for life (TIME is a finite element, too), and THEN maybe you have a case for demanding gestation. Not willing to spend that? Then apparently you don’t value the fetus all that much, so where do you get off demanding that others do so?
I totally agree with what you say about value. I chose to not have children because I value, my time, autononomy and peace and quiet. Children disrupt those things, now its not bad, it is just that I value those things I mentioned above more than raising, parenting, and bearing children. Now somebody else might find great value in raising children, I just don’t, it is a lifestyle preference, I sure would not IMPOSE my choice on others. Their are definitely hierarchy of value, people use that all the time even if they are not aware of it. You are right people value different people and things differently. You just can’t value every single person the same, their is no way.
Gladys, the forced birthers don’t value the ‘precious zygote’ themselves. As exemplified by my example of the billionaire.
When people sob: “You can’t put a dollar value on human lives’, what they mean is: It’s not polite to TALK about doing so. But we do so nevertheless. There is a dollar limit to what we would pay for a kidnapped child, what we would pay for a bomb threat, what we would pay for someone’s medical care, etc. And it varies depending on who needs the money for their ‘very lives’ and who is doing the paying, and how. I value my friend enough to have given him a big chunk of money for his emergency dental problem. You would almost certainly not value HIM that much. Nor should you. You don’t know him. My friends are my friends, and your friends are your friends. Probably you would give your own friends monetary help if they needed it and you could afford it, but it would be absurd to demand that *I* give my money to *your* friends, or require me to spend time with them, or be tortured on their behalf because YOU value them.
Now, can you really picture any billionaire, even one who claims to be ‘pro-life’ paying $10 million for a kidnapped frozen zygote? Neither can I. Nobody believes zygotes have the same ‘value’ as infants. They just claim to. I dislike liars intensely.
Another example? Numbers don’t lie. And what the numbers say is, 90% of fetuses diagnosed with Down’s Syndrome are aborted. The problem with this is, 50% of the people in the US claim to be pro-choice and 50% claim to be pro-life. Now, even if all the pro-choicers were aborting upon getting a diagnosis of DS, if the pro-lifers were NOT aborting, it would mean only 50% of DS fetuses would be aborted.
But the actual figure is 90%. What this means is, when ‘pro-lifers’ find out that THEY have that ‘precious little DS fetus’ pregnancy, 80% of them are making a mad rush for the nearest abortion clinic. The ‘sacrifices’ are for someone else. Never them.
Crickets….
No, it not “simple”. Aren’t you aware that up to 80% of embryos fail to implant in a uterine wall and are expelled from sexually active women during menses? Not just one unfertilized egg a month is flushed from sexually active women during menstrual flow; so many people have this simplistic notion of a woman’s reproductive system. Gynecologists estimate that half of those embryos that do not imbed could have been viable fetuses had they burrowed their way into the uterine lining within a favorable window of 6 to 12 days after fertilization. Furthermore, March of Dimes estimates that half of all pregnancies spontaneous abort. Sexually active women are often unaware they have conceived and aborted, and don’t think it unusual if there is a heavy period or clumping.
Abortion is a natural bodily process in a woman’s reproductive system. Since implanted as well as un-implanted perfectly viable embryos are shed from sexually active women, what difference does it make if a woman chooses to un-implant her own embryo? NONE.
You must recall that my boyfriend and I have 3 garter snakes, and at no point do we privately call them ‘Thamnophis Sirtalis’. But I do refer to them as that in a facebook garter snake group. Getting frantic about specific terminology in public debate and message boards and whining that something must always be referred to by a very broad term that includes objects with different qualities is dishonest.
Did you not say you have a high reading comprehension? If so, you would notice that I have said I don’t care about the terminology. If you want to say fetus or embryo, by all means. They are perfectly fine words with understandable meanings. It is clearly you and Gladys that have issues with terminology and are throwing a fit over me saying unborn baby.
I’m not sure how well the conversation will move forward in a forum where some of your interlocutors are a bit overbearing.:-/
There are several concerns that I have with some things you have said.
For example, you stated that you tend to come down more on the side of liberty than life. Also, you voiced a concern than Pro-Lifers worship life instead of God.
I’ll first respond to the issue of life vs. liberty.
One reason why I’m life first, liberty second is because life is a precondition of liberty. If a person has no life then obviously they have no liberty either.
Secondly, you stated that there is a danger of worshipping life. I think this is a misunderstanding.
It is not worshipping life to view it as a precious gift. I understand that may not be a view you hold but it is the view of many who hold the Prolife position.
If we do view life as a gift from God, the more deeply we love Him, the more we will value His gifts. This is not because of false worship, but because of our love for Him.
I want to end by apologizing for some of the more virulent response made here in the comments. If you would like to correspond more in depth, I would be happy to have an email exchange with you. I recognize this is not a topic that lends itself well to comment threads.
Sure what is your email address? i agree it is difficult to discuss via comments.
martinbarnard “at” gmail dot com
beretta1071@gmail.com
If it is my comments you are referring to, spare the apology and take it up with me.
Yes, I did find your comments harsh in places in a way that probably hindered discussion.
You and I are on the same side here ideologically so no need to argue but we all have different ways of going about things:)
Thanks, I think there is room for different approaches. I have been leaning more towards a Matt Walsh tone in comments. I also try to let
And what is your ‘precious gift’ of ‘life’ worth, without mind? Beyond whatever value a bacteria might have?
And if ‘precious potential’ gives it value, why don’t sperm and eggs have value? Why is there no gasping in awe value if the sperm is a few inches away from the egg, but suddenly infinite value falls out of the sky, the moment it touches the egg?
You object to ‘location’ making any difference, regarding an 8 month fetus that is located a few inches inside vs a few inches outside the vagina, so why does ‘location’ suddenly make this huge, gasping in awe difference with the egg and sperm?
Other than maybe your wanting to punish someone for xex, hmmm?
Hmm…you seem angry.
I’m wondering why you’re ascribing motive to me when you have never met me? You seem to have already made up your mind on this topic and you’re just here to troll. I don’t believe the exchange would be at all edifying on that basis.
The only remark I will make is that based on your comment about mind, you must be comfortable with the killing the severely handicapped. From there, your worldview unravels as we see what life is worth without an external Authority to give value.
**The only remark I will make is that based on your comment about mind, you must be comfortable with the killing the severely handicapped.**
So based on your comment, you apparently don’t think that thinking, feeling handicapped people have any more value than mindless cells.
**. From there, your worldview unravels as we see what life is worth without an external Authority to give value.**
Translation – Human minds have value, but you have no good reason why mindless cells have value other than resorting to claiming that ‘God said so’.
**It is evident in this discussion that to some people, human life is not intrinsically valuable, only the human “mind”. Therefore, a futile attempt was made to appeal to divine authority. An apology is hereby proffered to any offended by the obvious nonsense of this approach. It should be noted, however, that many handicapped individuals have much less discernible “mind” than the average poodle.**
^Not that any of that makes any difference to you, but it is noted.
This is the problem if the mother does not want to be pregnant, than an abortion is the only way to end a pregnancy. If my sister chose it I would support her decision, if she chose to give birth, i would support her too. I can advise her of all her options but it is up to her. It is what it is, i love my sister and i value her more than an embryo.
You know what is ice cold, putting a mindless embryo that has no feeling, and not aware of itself, over a pregnant person that has feelings, fear, desires and is thinking and aware. I don’t know about you but i commiserate with the pregnant person more so.
Yes, the progressive political philosophy is incoherent. It’s also largely irrelevant, although you wouldn’t know that from reading conservative Christian blogs.
Truth be told, the overwhelming majority of non-ideological Americans (which includes most of us) disfavor restricting access to early-term abortion and disfavor withholding marriage licenses from same-sex couples. That doesn’t mean that we believe that abortion or same-sex marriage are necessarily wise or unwise. I happen to think that abortion is generally unwise and have no general view on the wisdom of same-sex marriage. Even so, I’m content to limit governmental interference into people’s lives when it comes to these and other matters. And I’m guessing that that’s where most Americans are on these issues. So, by arguing against a progressive straw man, you’re failing to address the reasons why most Americans have come to reject socially conservative positions on these issues. It’s not about progressivism or a failure to see the merits of community. Rather, it’s about keeping nanny-state moral paternalism at bay, and allowing people to associate into community by choice and not merely into community that meets the government’s stamp of approval.
The problem with social conservatism isn’t that it conflicts with progressivism. Rather, its chief problem is that it conflicts with people’s general desire to live without undue government interference. Put another way, your failure isn’t because the culture has gone the way of Lena Dunham; rather, your failure lies in that most of us are not too different from Ron Swanson. We agree with you that the socially progressive worldview is incoherent. We just don’t see your socially reactionary worldview as any less incoherent.
How is a society in which no woman can get help having her unborn child killed interfering with women who want to kill their children?
How is society in which no one considers a relationship between people of the same sex to be marriages interfering in the lives of people who form same sex relationships?
You’re free to hold whatever opinions you like on these matters. As I noted, I happen to believe that abortion is generally unwise. That said, I don’t see the state as having a sufficient basis for exercising moral paternalism on questions of early-term abortion and same-sex marriage. That has nothing to do with my personal opinions on those matters. It has to do with the fact that I distrust government-sponsored moral paternalism, except when necessary to prevent the imposition of material harm onto non-consenting third parties.
On abortion, I do believe that there comes a point when the state’s interest in protecting viable human life would justify intrusion. But, during the first trimester, when fetal life is precarious and often terminates for a whole host of reasons, I see little basis for government intrusion.
My questions don’t hinge on government intrusion.
Also, you miss that in the real world the government is in the business of helping women kill their babies. The government is also now in the business of coercing others to act like a marriage can exist between people of the same sex. The government *is* intruding in both areas. It is not neutral a entity that lets women figure out for themselves how to kill their babies and also let’s two men say they are “married” to each other. The government makes sure someone will help that woman and also that someone will agree with those men.
Yes, but the government is not forcing any women to have abortions, all it is doing is stating that it is legal. No woman is forced to have abortion. A woman by her own volition goes to have one done or goes to her doctor that gives her an abortion pill. All the government is saying is that it is legal, their is no intrusion. Just so you know women have been having abortions using herbs since before modern medicine. It is out of their own volition that women have abortions.
The government has taken an active role in helping making it easier for women to kill their babies. This goes beyond it being merely legal for women to murder their babies.
an embryo is not a a baby. You keep equating to a newborn that can cry and breath and is animated and has emotions. An embryo does not do any of those things. It is mindless has no emotions, no fears, no desires. Most abortions occur at the embryo state 5-6 weeks it is the size of a pea, have you seen pictures of embryos i have, and know what they look like, they are not babies.
You keep making this averment. But, when asked to substantiate it with evidence, you keep coming up empty. The mere fact that the government elects not to criminalize something does not mean that the government is “taking[ing] an active role” in promoting it.
Is state funding of organizations that specialize in abortion not enough in and of itself to justify the claim that the state helps women get abortions? It is not as if the the government funds Dunkin Donuts.
There are also states that mandate clinics that specialize in helping pregnant women let those women know they can get their babies killed at other clinics. No state makes bakers let their customers know they can legally purchase donuts at donut shops.
The mere fact that the government permits something to occur does not mean that the government is endorsing it. The government permit me to eat a donut for breakfast this morning. That doesn’t mean that the government is therefore endorsing my donut-eating.
So, yes, your questions do hinge on government intrusion. You’re essentially saying that the government should actively forbid everything that it doesn’t specifically endorse.
Why are you ignoring what I am saying? The government is not helping you get donuts in the same way it helps women kill their babies.
I do think that baby murder should be forbidden, my original question was in response to your insinuation that the present status quo in which government helps make it easy for women to kill their babies is the only way the government could not infringe on a woman’s “freedom”. I raised the possibility of a society in which a woman could kill her baby but she had to do it herself because everyone else has freely chosen to not help her. This is a society that our current laws don’t exactly allow.
So you are saying that it would be better for abortions to go underground, and so women and create a black market for them. I don’t think that will make it any better, if anything you will have a lot more women being harmed and more shady doctors or practitioners doing unsafe abortions to avoid prosecution. You fail to understand that women will still seek abortions even if they are made illegal.
No, please read my actual comment again.
People keep murdering adults even though it is illegal. No sane person uses this as an argument for legalizing adult murder. So why are you using as an argument for legalizing baby murder?
i don’t equate an abortion at 1st trimester of an embroyo the same as murder.
So? Why does your opinion matter more than any objective facts?
It is not an objective fact, murder is a legal term, embryos are not considered persons, so it is not murder, besides embroyos are not autonomous individuals with the same rights as born persons living outside the woman’s body. That is why it is not considered murder. Giving someone personhood is a philosophical question that to some extent has not been answered, for the time being they are not considered persons, that is why we have birth certificates.
Were you ever an unborn baby?
Yes so what, I did not have any rights then either
You are a person, you were in your mother’s womb. Do the math. If you really had no rights then, you don’t have any now either. Right’s are not just magically granted after passing some arbitrary developmental milestone.
I was not a person when I was a 5 week embryo, I was a potential person. Yes rights are granted by society by consenses.
Why does the obvious inconsistency in what you have said here not bother you? You said that you were a 5 week embryo and then said this 5 week embryo was not a person. Both cannot be true, if that 5 week embryo was you then it was a person.
A society that believes it can grant rights by consensus also believes it can ungrant rights by consensus. You have been warned. This is the world you want to make. I hope you take it well when it’s your rights that have been ungranted by consensus.
It is not inconsistent to say that i was an embryo, at the same time i did not have personhood rights at that stage of development. I was granted those rights when i was born. Just because I was an embryo does not mean that i had the same rights as a born person, so i did have lesser rights when i was in the womb, so what it does not bother me.
I don’t find it a crime if my mother decided to abort me, her rights /well being come first. NOthing would have been taken from me, because i was not even aware of my existence, so i would not be here. Maybe God would have granted me to exist to a different parent, I don’t know, but it does not bother me, we all did not exist before we did.
What method would a society have to grant rights other than by consensus, or perhaps conquest by a stronger society?
You have just invented the category of potential person. There is no evidence nor reason to believe potential persons exist.
You also have again contradicted yourself by identifying this “potential person” as you. Why doesn’t this contradiction bother you?
I just called it potential person, doesn’t have to be. The point is i did not have the same rights as a born person, nothing confusing about it. If you want we can just call that i was just an embryo/fetus with not the same rights at a born person is that better?
Yes, it is more coherent for you to say you had no rights and drop the potential person nonsense. The question this raises is why you should have any rights now.
If rights are just granted by social consensus as you believe, if the social consensus was that there should be no right to abortion, would you accept this or would you believe it was unjust? If unjust, on what basis?
I would accept it, but i would find it be be a violation of a woman’s bodily autonomy though.
OK, so you do think this alleged right to abort exists beyond a social consensus. Which indicates you recognize that some rights are inherent and not just granted by powerful people.
For the sake of clarification, can you explain what bodily autonomy means to you. I think the right to life is clear cut, but this “right to bodily autonomy” is murky.
The right not to gestate a pregnancy against our will and or donate our organs or blood without consent, that is what I mean by bodily autonomy. In the united stated, you cannot force someone to donate your organs to save a person life, so in the unites states, our laws cannot value bodily autonomy or bodily integrity more than life.
Please explain how pregnancy and organ donation belong in the same category.
Pregnancy can be a life threatening condition. Gestating requires the body to share its blood, oxygen and other nutrients, which can cause hardship on the host, I will name a few (blood clots, high blood pressure, kidney problems, pre-clamasia, diabetes) a person should NOT have to go thru pregnancy by force even if it was consensual sex. Organ donation can also cause medical trauma to the person donating, so person should not required to do so, even if the recipient dies without it, just as a fetus dies if aborted, get it now?
They belong in the same category because both can cause medical trauma. That is a brilliant observation. Playing sports can also cause medical trauma, so I suppose we should add that to the list too. This explanation does nothing to alleviate my total disappointment in the intellectual integrity of your view. Your arguments have been based on made up facts (potential person), have been totally incoherent…you have continually identified yourself as a non-person, and also based on circular definitions (abortion and bodily autonomy). And here, you create a category (medical trauma) to include pregnancy in that is so broad that it ends up being meaningless. At least you have Bob on your side, who has insinuated that pro-lifers actually are rapists so their arguments can just be dismissed.
Please explain which organs are located outside your skin.
Defining “bodily autonomy” as the right to terminate a pregnancy is circular. Abortion must be a right because bodily autonomy is a right and bodily autonomy is the right to abortion. I am very disappointed about this. I thought you might have something better.
my answer is YES. Let me spell it out for you. If I get pregnant even though iam using birth control , I will have an abortion. You ask why? because I DO NOT want to be pregnant and go thru childbirth, I don’t wish to go thru 9 months of pregnancy, does that make sense to you? by outlawing abortion women will NOT have the option to terminate, thus will be forced to stay pregnant, does that make sense? or is that logic too hard for you to understand.
I just don’t want the option outlawed, that is all, not complicated.
bodily autonomy is a right, it is a right to not have our bodies violated, or used in a manner that we don’t consent to, which includes, pregnancy, organ donation, blood donation, have leeches on my skin. That is what I am referring to.
Nope, bodily autonomy gives you other rights, such as not to donate blood, not to have sex, etc. You lose.
If the right to life is ‘clear’, why are eggs and sperm arbitrarily omitted?
If the social consensus was that there should be no right to kill innocent preconcieved human beings by male masturbation or oral favors, would you accept this, or would you believe it was unjust. If unjust, on what basis?
You do know that masturbation & oral favors don’t lead to conception, right?
You do know that sperm are living, have human DNA, and are a stage in the human life cycle, right?
Why should you be able to kill them for mere convenience? Just because they ‘haven’t been conceived’? Others thing fetuses should be able to be killed because they ‘haven’t been born’. Why is your arbitrary stage in development ‘right’, but a different stage ‘wrong’, other than you not wanting to give up masturbation and oral favors?
Conception isn’t an arbitrary stage.
Were you ever an egg and a sperm? Do the math. If you had no rights then, you don’t have any now, either. Rights are not just magically granted after passing through some arbitrary developmental milestone.
Why does your opinion that the embryo is a ‘real baby for sure’ matter more than the objective facts that it has no brain function until 22-25 weeks?
I’m ignoring what you’re saying because it’s patently false. The government is not helping women get abortions and is not helping people get same-sex marriage licenses.
Moreover, no doctor is required to perform abortions. So, the possibility you suggested is an accurate description of the society in which we live. That said, some doctors elect to perform abortions, just as others elect to administer botox to wrinkled faces. But that doesn’t mean that the government is endorsing the use of botox or helping people obtain botox administrations.
I think you are right in the sense of describing most peoples views, but those views are not non-ideological. They fundamentally rest on Liberal (in its original sense) philosophy and Libertarian ideology which defines community as a mere free association of individuals and detaches and juxtaposes government from community. A government as the governing body of the sovereign community has a duty to uphold moral order, this is fundamentally why laws are created and enforced; murder is defined as immoral, it is legally criminalised, and it is punished.
The problem is that do define the immoral should rest on a transcendent principle, so ‘murder is wrong because it rejects the telos of humanity which is life with God’ or ‘murder is wrong because it violates the law of love’. Liberalism has moved how we define what is immoral based on whether or not it violates personal autonomy, i.e. ‘murder is wrong because the one who is murdered did not consent to be murdered and has had his/her rights violated’. As we move further along this path then the issues of morality become issues of consent, our debate is moved from what is right or wrong to whether consent exists (at what age for example) and whether it was given in any given situation.
The issue for Christians and conservatives is that they ultimately reject Liberalism and the definition of morality based thereon as opposed to transcendent morality. That being said many conservatives (and indeed Christians) accept many of the premises of Liberalism without realising it and are thus incoherent in their ideology. Likewise do progressives reject certain premise of Liberalism (especially in regards to economics) and are thus themselves incoherent. And so we have a false battle between two forms of Liberalism, the Progressives (in the U.S. Democrats) and the Conservatives (in the U.S. Republicans) whilst many such as yourself are more logically coherent in your support of Liberalism. On the other hand there are those who reject Liberalism its in entirety, which is where the true battle lies between full acceptance and full rejection.
I understand what you’re saying. That said, our entire Constitution largely embodies the principles of classical liberalism, albeit in a somewhat more conservative sense. So, what you’re proposing is the upending of our entire Constitutional system of government.
Further, notions of consent and harm played a central role in ethical reasoning well before the advent of modernism. In fact, the Golden Rule states something along those lines. These “teleological” arguments seem to have emerged in recent years because social conservatives have come up dry trying to explain why I should care whether the lesbian couple down the hall from me has a state-issued marriage license or not. But if we’re going to start making laws based on unprovable teleological postulates, then it sounds like you’re proposing something akin to a theocracy.
It amazes me just how unaware you are of what you are saying. If it is the case that just recognizing marriages between men and women can only be justified based on unprovable teleological postulates, the same is true of recognizing “marriage” between just any two unrelated adults.
Of course, this unproven teleological postulate really isn’t so anyway. We actually have proven that men and women are not identical nor interchangeable and that the institution of marriage exists because men and women are not identical nor interchangeable. In light of these facts, inserting same sex relationships into this institution just cannot logically be done. This has nothing to do with what you care about. It is not like you have any more reason to care if three brothers living on the next block have a “marriage license” together either.
You’ve actually confused what I was saying. I’m not suggesting that the government needs any particular justification for issuing civil marriage licenses. It needs no such justification. But once the state elects to issue such licenses (which it need not do at all), it cannot refuse to issue a license to applicants unless doing so is a rational way of furthering some legitimate governmental purpose. Promoting teleological notions about the significance of gender differences is hardly something into which the state has any business intruding. Such matters are better handled within the context of faith communities.
…And would you say that post Obergefell that no teleological notion about human beings is being promoted with respect to what sort of relationships marriage licenses are issued to?
Not any more than it does for any other private-party transactions. What teleological notion is the state promoting when it issues me a vehicle title?
What about promoting the teleological notion of just two person relationships is rational?
The state doesn’t promote teleological notions of anything. That’s not the state’s purpose. The purpose of things like marriage licenses and vehicle titles is to establish a set of default rules that conform to people’s settled expectations. We’ve had same-sex coupling for several decades in the US, and we’ve come to observe that the legal expectations of those couples is consistent with the default rules that make up the institution of civil marriage. Thus, the benefits of including them within the ambit of civil marriage laws outweighs any minimal costs of doing so.
We don’t have civil laws governing plural marriage because the cost-benefit analysis comes out the other way on that question. Plural marriages tend to be fairly idiosyncratic, and do not follow any consistent pattern. In most cases, plural marriages occur within conservative religious sects, where the nature of the relationships reflects the the religious tenets of a particular sect. Thus, it is more transactionally efficient to allow the religious sect to mediate disputes concerning plural marriages than it is for the state to do so.
The purpose of civil laws, including civil marriage laws, is to effect transactional efficiency. Moral questions are the exclusive province of criminal law. The absence of laws covering plural marriage has nothing to do with moral objections to the practice. Rather, it has to do with the fact that such relationships are sufficiently idiosyncratic to defy the creation of any kind of uniform civil scheme where the benefits of such a scheme outweigh the costs of creating and maintaining it. Mind you, plural marriage is not illegal. Bigamy–the obtaining of a marriage license without dissolving any prior marriage–is illegal, but that’s because it’s a form of fraud. The bigamist is being punished for the fraudulent act (which creates legal uncertainty as to the title of real and personal property), not for the fact that he has multiple wives.
Moral disapproval plays little role in the civil law. It is the main consideration in criminal law. But, even there, we only tend to punish actions as criminal that impose some material harm onto parties that have not or cannot consent to it.
Sure sure, but you have said that the state was promoting a teleological notion when marriage was recognized between male/female relationships and not just any two person relationship so long as those two people were not too closely related just because. So per you, the state at least *has* promoted teleological notions. Which raised the question if the state still *is* promoting a teleological notion by now recognizing just any two person relationship so long as those two people are not too closely related. To suggest what that teleological notion may be, perhaps the view that people are meant to find some sort of life partner that is not a close relative. If the state should not promote any teleological notion with legal marriage recognition and the state still is doing so that is a problem for you.
FYI your comment is by and large irrelevant gibberish that you just made up. No cost/benefit analysis has been done that could possibly show that two person relationships should be called marriages but three or four person relationships should not be. You also fail to recognize that the people demanding that same sex partnerships be called marriages did so on the basis of some previously undiscovered fundamental right of which no evidence for exists. This is largely the argument the courts went with. They were not arguing based on transactional efficiency, whatever the heck that means here (hence the gibberish).
Such multi-party relationships may still be a marriage. They’re just not a type of marriages for which the state establishes a set of default civil rules into which the parties can opt.
I’m just pointing out that there’s a rational basis for distinguishing between two-party and multi-party marriages. By contrast, there is no rational basis for distinguishing between opposite-sex and same-sex two-party relationships, at least not insofar as the state is concerned.
“I’m just pointing out that there’s a rational basis for distinguishing between two-party and multi-party marriages. By contrast, there is no rational basis for distinguishing between opposite-sex and same-sex two-party relationships, at least not insofar as the state is concerned.”
Do you really believe this?
The secular culture accepts that there is a right to sexual gratification, and anyone getting in the way of that right is evil. The atheists and agnostics and “Nones” may claim they don’t believe in any god or any afterlife, but like all human beings who ever existed, they have their own dogmas, and they are very aggressive in pushing those dogmas. Christians have, for the most part, caved in. In terms of identification, there are lots more Christians in the US than there are atheists or “Nones,” but our influence is less because so many people (including Christians) have accepted the liberal dogma that secularism is “the right side of history” (never mind that “history” is an abstraction, as is its “right side,” and that there is no more proof in the existence of ” the right side of history” than there is for the existence of God).
“Love is never wrong” proved to be a highly effective slogan. For the time being, the LGBTXYZ movement denies that it wishes to legalize pedophilia, but once you’ve convinced people that “love is never wrong” and that children are “born gay,” and that there are millions of “gay kids” and “transgender kids” in America, we know where this is headed. On any thread dealing with LGBT issues, when someone brings up pedophilia, the usual response is, “No, that will never happen – it’s illegal.” That’s NOT the same as “No, it’s wrong.” “Illegal” can be changed to “legal” with the stroke of a pen. Terry Bean, founder of the so-called Human Rights Campaign, has a male “partner,” but he and the partner were both arrested for sexual assault on an underage boy. There are numerous cases of two gay men or two lesbians adopting children and then sexually abusing them. In the meantime, the LGBT advocates continue to insist that homosexuality and pedophilia are two entirely different things, although the police and courts know better. We’re not far away from being told that we are “bigots” and “haters” because we “exclude” and “persecute” adults who happen to find sexual gratification – for publicity purpose, referred to as “love” – with children.
I’m not sure that those who obsess over others’ sex lives are necessarily evil. I do think that they need to find something more productive to do with their time. Further, the rates of child sexual abuse among gay people are no higher than for the general population. Lastly, most people oppose pedophilia because the victim has not or is unable to consent to the sexual encounter, not merely because “it’s illegal.”
Once the secular left endorses pedophilia – and it will – the “Christian” left will do the same. Your side is totally predictable: Whatever the NY Times is endorsing, you’re behind it.
The good news is: the mainline churches are dying fast. The PC-SJW religion just doesn’t interest people.
If you see that happening, then you surely have few friends and colleagues who are libertarians or liberals. Further, I’m not a liberal. I’m a conservative in the Burkian sense. I’m generally wary of any exercise of state power, and would prefer to limit it to instances where an activity imposes material harm onto others without their consent. Beyond that, I see no need for government-initiated moral paternalism.
In case you haven’t followed the numbers, evangelicalism is only a generation behind the mainline church in cultural irrelevance.
**The secular culture accepts that there is a right to sexual gratification, and anyone getting in the way of that right is evil.**
So, according to you, you should get to dictate what other people do with their own bodies.
**Christians have, for the most part, caved in.**
And by ‘caved in’ what you mean is that the Christians aren’t being forced to have sex, but they no longer have the privilege of controlling what other people do with their own bodies.
**once you’ve convinced people that “love is never wrong” and that children are “born gay,” and that there are millions of “gay kids” and “transgender kids” in America, we know where this is headed**
Slippery slope fallacy, and fails to explain why there would be a special right to sexually abuse children because they were ‘born gay’ any more than there should be such a right because they are ‘born straight’.
**There are numerous cases of two gay men or two lesbians adopting children and then sexually abusing them.**
And there are no cases of straight men sexually abusing children?
Although I agree with much of this essay, I do think that there is a presupposition that needs to be clearly stated. It is this: that the sexual revolution depends upon a (false) natural positive right to pregnancy-free and consequence-free coitus. The corresponding (and false) natural positive duty is for the baby not to be conceived. If the baby is conceived, he has violated his duty and the person’s right for pregnancy-free coitus.
But there is even a presupposition under this, and it is existence of the fully grown and functioning citizen. How this person got to be an adult and fully functioning is not accounted for under sexual revolutionary ideology. It is as if he sprang out of a pod, fully formed and ready for productive adult life. Without consciously accounting for the sexual and complementary nature of his origins (ie, that he has a mother and a father who had sex with each other at least one time), it makes sense that he thinks he can presume a right to live his sexual life in a manner that corresponds to his neglect of his own personal anthropology. He has cut himself off at the roots in an attempt to liberate himself.