Hesher

Most people with medical backgrounds laugh at this argument. You genocidal freak, how dare you shed your entire mass of body cells within seven years? Those cells ALL HAD LIFE! It's almost as silly as the religious Christians who argue that you are wasting potential life by masturbating or having sex with birth control. Your body produces millions of "possible lives" in the form of sperm or eggs that are never fertilized or will even have a remote possibility of becoming human. The question in this debate is, when does a fetus become human, and considering that spinal tissue and brain material don't develop until relatively late in a pregnancy (when very few abortions occur), it's really silly imo. In most cases an abortion as a medical procedure has more in common metaphorically and technically with excising a tumour than delivering a baby.

Fetuses (note, I didn't say babies) are not human and therefore do not have rights. The science doesn't support the "pro-life" argument, and religious belief should not affect lawmaking.

Guybrush

As Hesher writes, to many this statement will seem utterly ridiculous. Not only is it idealistic to the point of naitivity, it's also rather unable to help us when we need to make important decisions about life. By this logic, stepping on an ant makes you a murderer. You have life - the ant has life. If only you or the ant could live, which one of you should? The rule says to revere all life equally. The ant might as well live.

See? It makes no sense at all.

__________________
Something Completely Different

Neapolitan

When I said life = life I thought you would know that "human" was implied; human life = human life. Maybe your non humous flails are Freudian slips and you believe an unborn child's life is equal to dead cells, chairs and ants. On the otherhand, I believe an unborn child is human being.

toretorden,

I don't believe in Utilitarianism in justifing abortion.

What I said was a mother has life, you understand the importance of this statement, right? It would wrong to take the life of the mother, right? The unborn baby also has life, so therefore it would be wrong to take the life of the unborn baby. And I never said one was more important then the other, when I was talking about mother and unborn child.

child is a human being
an unborn baby is a human being
taking the life of an innocent child is wrong
human being = human being
If one believes taking a life of an innocent child is wrong, then one must come to the conclusion that taking the life of the unborn human being is wrong.

Astronomer

But then if you say an embryo/ early stage fetus is a human being, you'd also have to say that sperm are human beings, eggs are human beings, and that other human cells are human beings etc... and so the life of the mother does not equal the life of a human cell. I think that's what people coming from a scientific/ medical perspective are trying to say.

Sperm are also cells with life that have the potential to become a child... so do you think it's wrong to dispose of sperm wrongfully? You can't argue that life = life when looking at it from a medical perspective.

__________________

CAPTAIN CAVEMAN

if life = life then chances are you're sitting among the processed corpses of innocent trees you MURDERER

crash_override

The arguement I tend to side with, at least as an American. Is that as an American citizen, you deserve the right to choose whether you want to be a parent or not. I mean, if you're so ****ing pro life then why don't you adopt all the babies that are born without responsible parents? Until you start doing so, your testimony/ opinions are stictly invalid.

__________________
My MB music journal

Guybrush

Neapolitan, if you value the human life over the ant life, you should make a point about it other than saying "life = life". We're not mind readers here.

I would still argue that your point of view makes no sense. I guess you know the utilitarian view, but I'll summarize for those who don't. From a utilitarian point of view, the right moral action/decision is the one that causes most happiness / least amount of suffering. By that logic, abortion is sometimes justified. Because none of us can read the future, we have to base moral decisions on the present. A fetus likely does not have the same capability of suffering as the mother, so it gets less moral consideration. It might have the same capability in the future, but we don't know that so that is irrelevant.

It's easy to see there's some kind of logic here - you want to ease suffering and make people happy - get the best results you can quality-of-life-wise. But what's the logic behind your moral stance? Okay, above all you want to preserve human life, but why? What makes it so holy? You say it's the same as killing a human, but abortion is legal in many places in the world where murder is outlawed so it's appearant that a lot don't agree with that "logic" either and there's a good reason. If you look at a fetus and then look at yourself, you'll see you're not the same. The fetus has potential, but having potential doesn't necessarily mean it should be protected like a person is.

I don't think human lives are any more special than those of animals. To me life is life and there's nothing holy about it. The difference is we generally have more emotional ties to people of our species. What matters are consequences. If someone was completely braindead and could only experience pain and the relatives thought it would be best if they were unplugged from the life support, I can see why that could be considered the right moral decision. It seems to me you could not support this because it would be murder.

__________________
Something Completely Different

Neapolitan

What point of view is that? That I believe a human fetus is a human being? That the life of a human fetus is just as important as the life of all human being? That a human fetus should not be terminated?

Hesher

As I said. A point of view not supported by science or medicine or any factual basis. Do you agree that there is no logic behind your claim? Because we will stop lambasting you if you admit to it; there's no point in arguing with that.

Son of JayJamJah

To suppose their is no logic behind it devalues your point. It's extremely logical if you didn't know and watched an egg hatch into a chick you'd think there was something alive inside that egg wouldn't you? Seems very logical to me. Cells are living organisms, there are a hundred ways to punch holes in your presumption.

Lets take it to an even simpler and more undeniable level. If you had a shoebox that knew was going to be filled with 1 million dollars in nine months if you did everything your accountant told you to do would you not consider it 1 million dollars?

I don't see what someones else's opinion on what is or isn't living is any of your business.

__________________
Me, Myself and I United as One

If you're posting in the music forums make sure to be thoughtful and expressive, if you're posting in the lounge ask yourself "is this something that adds to the conversation?" It's important to remember that a lot of people use each thread. You're probably not as funny or clever as you think, I know I'm not.

My Van Morrison Discography Thread