Originally posted by Tauwasser

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My point being, that in the end, I for one would prefer the clinical way to abort a foetus rather than having women staggering with hangers to kill it. That's all.

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Originally posted by Tauwasser

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You say that no animal deserves the same consideration as a human because they are "lower species". That won't fit with your stance on abortion, because it can be seen pretty much as the same thing. It's not a human yet, so it certainly according to you must be lower. Then why would anyone have to consider it with like rights as humans'?

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Originally posted by Tauwasser

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And hopefully it stays that way and conservative people like you don't take over the world. I would definitely hate to see a good solution to this problem (in the clinical sense at least) get wiped out because some jerks with only Jesus and how he loves all his children on their minds have the rights to say what'll happen. You see such prats every day in the American Congress (though that should've hopefully changed now).

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Originally posted by Silvershield

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The fetus is human.

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Originally posted by Pvt. Prinny

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Originally posted by Silvershield

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The fetus is human.

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And this, right here, is your opinion. Treat it as such. Don't wave it around like it's a fact.

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Originally posted by Pvt. Prinny

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And this, right here, is your opinion. Treat it as such. Don't wave it around like it's a fact.

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Originally posted by Lakithunder

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Egg-sactly (get it?)

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Originally posted by Professor Micheline Matthews-Roth, Harvard University Medical School

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It is incorrect to say that biological data cannot be decisive...It is scientifically correct to say that an individual human life begins at conception.

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Originally posted by Dr. Alfred M. Bongioanni, Professor of Pediatrics and Obstetrics, University of Pennsylvania

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I have learned from my earliest medical education that human life begins at the time of conception.

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Originally posted by Dr. Jerome LeJeune, Professor of Genetics, University of Descartes

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"After fertilization has taken place a new human being has come into being. [It] is no longer a matter of taste or opinion...it is plain experimental evidence. Each individual has a very neat beginning, at conception.

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Originally posted by Professor Hymie Gordon, Mayo Clinic

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By all the criteria of modern molecular biology, life is present from the moment of conception.

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Originally posted by Dr. Watson A. Bowes, University of Colorado Medical School

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The beginning of a single human life is from a biological point of view a simple and straightforward matter – the beginning is conception.

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Originally posted by wikipedia

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Mary Anne Warren, in her famous article arguing for the permissibility of abortion,[4] holds that moral opposition to abortion is based on the following argument:

1. It is wrong to kill innocent human beings.
2. The fetus is an innocent human being.
3. Hence it is wrong to kill the fetus.

Warren, however, thinks that 'human being' is used in different senses in (1) and (2). In (1), 'human being' is used in a moral sense to mean a 'person', a 'full-fledged member of the moral community'. In (2), 'human being' means 'biological human'. That the fetus is a biologically human organism or animal is uncontroversial, Warren holds. But it does not follow that the fetus is a person, and it is persons that have rights, such as the right to life.[5]

To help make a distinction between 'person' and 'biological human', Warren notes that we should respect the lives of highly intelligent aliens, even if they are not biological humans. She thinks there is a cluster of properties that characterize persons6]

1. consciousness (of objects and events external and/or internal to the being), and in particular the capacity to feel pain
2. reasoning (the developed capacity to solve new and relatively complex problems)
3. self-motivated activity (activity which is relatively independent of either genetic or direct external control)
4. the capacity to communicate, by whatever means, messages of an indefinite variety of types, that is, not just with an indefinite number of possible contents, but on indefinitely many possible topics
5. the presence of self-concepts, and self-awareness, either individual or racial, or both

A person does not have to have each of these, but if something has all five then it definitely is a person whether it is biologically human or not, while if it has none or perhaps only one then it is not a person, again whether it is biologically human or not. The fetus has at most one, consciousness (and this only after it becomes susceptible to pain—the timing of which is disputed), and hence is not a person...

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Originally posted by Pvt. Prinny

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I'll concede that it is human life then. Still isn't a person. It's lower than a born animal.

I believe I told you before that we're nothing without our mind.

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Originally posted by Pvt. Prinny

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(by the way, cite your sources with a web page, book entry, magazine article, or something. You could type those and that would be the end, but it doesn't matter anyways.)

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Originally posted by wikipedia

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[many irrelevant remarks have been cut]

To help make a distinction between 'person' and 'biological human', Warren notes that we should respect the lives of highly intelligent aliens, even if they are not biological humans. She thinks there is a cluster of properties that characterize persons6]

1. consciousness (of objects and events external and/or internal to the being), and in particular the capacity to feel pain

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Originally posted by wikipedia

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2. reasoning (the developed capacity to solve new and relatively complex problems)

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Originally posted by wikipedia

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3. self-motivated activity (activity which is relatively independent of either genetic or direct external control)

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Originally posted by wikipedia

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4. the capacity to communicate, by whatever means, messages of an indefinite variety of types, that is, not just with an indefinite number of possible contents, but on indefinitely many possible topics

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Originally posted by wikipedia

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5. the presence of self-concepts, and self-awareness, either individual or racial, or both

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Originally posted by Pvt. Prinny

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I actually find this as over kill for an easy issue of it isn't human in any real sense. No brain. Just a glob of flesh.

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Originally posted by Pvt. Prinny

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It deals with all your infant points in that link.

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Originally posted by Pvt. Prinny

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I'm also no fan of late term abortion when the child has a very real chance to survive outside the womb and is practically fully developed.

Those are exceptionally rare though.

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Originally posted by Pvt. Prinny

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Mind? I mean thought. What do I think of a comatose patient? If it isn't reversible, I don't see the point in keeping them alive, I mean, you can if you want, but I wouldn't. It's just... we're really nothing special. We're just living things with the ability to think at a very high level, compared to things around us, and that is the only thing I view as special.

Read the article, because you're going to say infants don't show signs of that until 3-4 years old...

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Originally posted by Arwon

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According to the Koran, life begins at 60 days after conception, or some exact number like that. That's when the soul enters the body.

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Originally posted by Arwon

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As for mine, I've decided life begins at the quickening.

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Originally posted by Silvershield

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Originally posted by Pvt. Prinny

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I'm also no fan of late term abortion when the child has a very real chance to survive outside the womb and is practically fully developed.

Those are exceptionally rare though.

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They are rare - the dilation and extraction procedure itself kills roughly 3,000 infants a year, which is a substantial number but still a small percentage overall - but they are still vile. I mean, whatever a person's beliefs regarding abortion, how can anyone argue that a child that literally resembles a fully-formed human baby can be pulled from the womb and killed legally just based on the grounds that its head remains within the mother? I feel like that's a bit of a technicality.

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Originally posted by drjayphd

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Point of order: how many of those 3,000 D&X's were performed for birth-control reasons? As in, as opposed to because the fetus was endangering the life of the mother. I'm guessing you can't tell. So you can't really talk about those procedures as if they're ALL being performed for non-medical reasons.

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Originally posted by Wikipedia

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Reasons to have a late abortion include:

* Deteriorating financial situation
* A change in relationship with the father
* Lack of awareness of the pregnancy until its later stages
* Discovery of the pregnancy by others who persuade an abortion, for example parents of a minor
* Inability to have an abortion earlier in the pregnancy (e.g. lack of funds, or lack of transportation)
* Discovery of a fetal abnormality undetectable earlier in the pregnancy
* Pregnancy a risk to life or health


There is very little data on how common each of these reasons are. In 1987, the Alan Guttmacher Institute collected questionnaires from 1,900 women who were at abortion clinics procuring abortions. Of the 1,900, 420 had been pregnant for 16 or more weeks. These 420 women were asked to choose among a menu of reasons why they had not obtained the abortions earlier in their pregnancies. Two percent (2%) said "a fetal problem was diagnosed late in pregnancy." 71% responded "did not recognize that she was pregnant or misjudged gestation," 48% said "found it hard to make arrangements," and 33% said "was afraid to tell her partner or parents." The report did not indicate that any of the 420 abortions after 16 weeks were performed because of maternal health problems.

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Originally posted by wikipedia

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The infanticide objection points out that infants (indeed up to about one year of age, since it is only around then that they begin to outstrip the abilities of non-human animals) have only one of Warren’s characteristics—consciousness—and hence would have to be accounted non-persons on her view; thus her view would permit not only abortion but infanticide. Warren agrees that infants are non-persons (and so killing them is not strictly murder), but denies that infanticide is generally permissible.[14] For, Warren claims, once a human being is born, there is no longer a conflict between it and the woman's rights, since the human being can be given up for adoption. Killing such a human being would be wrong, not because it is a person, but because it would go against the desires of people willing to adopt the infant and to pay to keep the infant alive.

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Originally posted by Pvt. Prinny

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Morally correct does not equal right.

Morally wrong does not equal wrong.

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Originally posted by Pvt. Prinny

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And that study is 20 years old, an entire generation of kids has grown up, so I doubt it's accurate. It's also very limited in its numbers.

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Originally posted by Arwon

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The quickening is, medically, when it starts kicking or something. Around the 18 week mark I think. A lot of folk beliefs place the beginning of life around there, I think it's a reasonable way to reconcile the fact that pregnancy starts with a clump of tissue and ends with a baby, without having to jump to the ridiculousness of either extreme.

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Originally posted by Arwon

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[...] demands of the host woman [...]

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Originally posted by Arwon

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Of course it's arbitrary. That's the point. Rationality and absolute logic aren't everything--without being ameliorated by common sense they become loopy and rigid.

You use the term "arbitrary" like it's pejorative but arbitrary cut-off lines are widespread and necessary when you need to reconcile two contradictory demands or needs. Age of consent laws, for example, are a sloppy, inexact and necessary reconciling of basic personal autonomy and the need to protect young people. We set an arbitrary numerical value on the amount of a drug that is "for personal use" and the amount that constitutes a "dealer". THere's no reason for the line being exactly where it is, no rational justification... just the need to draw a sensible line.

Likewise, an arbitrary cut-off between "abortion is okay" and "abortion is not okay" is necessary to reconcile the competing rights demands of the host woman and the potentiality of human life she supports. When you have directly conflicting rights you need a way to trade them off with each other.

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Originally posted by Arwon

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I like the quickening because it has a long folksy history and it passes the "common sense" test so central to explaining why what you do to a 2-month old foetus isn't the same as what you do to an 8-month old baby.

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Originally posted by Silvershield

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For the life of me, I cannot understand this concept. If something is wrong, it is wrong. If something is right, it is right. If something is morally neutral or morally irrelevant, than it's a moot point whether it is right or wrong. But how can killing a baby be morally wrong yet still be right? Or vice versa?

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