Oryx
CoquettishCat
- 13,183
- Posts
- 14
- Years
- Age 32
- Seen Jan 30, 2015
I don't know how anyone with a basic understanding of human biology or an appreciation for the life of their fellow human beings can be pro-abortion (so it might be safe to say that most do not possess either or both of these things).
It is a biological fact that:
A fetus is genetically unique
A fetus is living tissue
A fetus has human DNA
Thus it can only be concluded that a fetus is a living human.
QED
Now, unless we disagree that the taking of another human life (i.e. murder) is wrong, it is safe to say that abortion is murder and thus is wrong, hence my 100% pro-life position. If you support abortion you are literally supporting the killing of another human being, or murder.
It has been argued that "it's the woman's body, so it's her choice!" However, as I stated above (and this is a fact), it is not the woman's body at all, but the body of another human being.
This is similar to the idea of life support. It's perfectly legal for the next of kin to decide that a person should be taken off of life support, even if they are in a coma that they can possibly wake from for example, not just someone who isn't ever going to recover. It's a matter of the rights of the child vs. the rights of the mother. If there was an affordable way to remove the child from the mother and bring it to term without infringing on the rights of the mother to her own body, then I'm sure people would advocate for that. But there isn't.
In support of Juicy's position however, it can be summed up very simply.
When a woman does not want to be a mother, she is pro-choice. However, when a man doesn't want to be a father, he is a dead beat dad. Juicy has been pointing out just some of the hypocrisy in society in relation to how men are treated. I honestly find this a problem too, since even if we do not want the child, men are forced by the government to pay.
Somehow I was hoping you would bring that fun little quote up somewhere after I saw it on irc so I could explain the difference between the two. When a man supports abortion, he is pro-choice. When a woman supports abortion, she is pro-choice. Pro-choice is not a gender-specific term. A deadbeat is a person who has chosen not to financially support a child. Deadbeat mothers exist as well. If a mother abandons their child and refuses to care for them financially, they are a deadbeat mom. Specifically, it's the failure to pay court-ordered child support. It's a legal term, not whatever you try to twist it into. That sounds cute when you just spit it out with no regard to what it actually means, but if you try to give it any deeper thought it immediately falls apart.
Let's turn that around. In a pro-life world, even if the woman does not want the child, she is forced by the government to bring it to term, change her life, lose control of her body, and possibly risk serious injury. The stakes are much higher for women than they are for men.
Consciousness does not define humanity. The child inside however, has always been alive and breathing, since the moment of fertilisation. It is you who arbitrarily decides when it is too late to abort. I say it is too late to abort right from the very start, otherwise you are committing an act of murder.
Question: What if the child has an identical twin, and therefore is not genetically unique? Then it's okay to murder it, right? So that premise is out the window there because not all humans are genetically unique. But if you just use 'living tissue' and 'human DNA' as the two premises that make a human, my skin is a human for a few seconds if I separate it from my body, before it dies. Because it's a human, I just committed murder. Same goes for every living thing in my body; it will continue to live for a time before it dies of lack of oxygen/food, therefore living tissue, with human DNA in it, therefore each is an individual human.
I think you need to rethink your definition.
History also shows us that women would lie. Up until 1988, Pennsylvania's Medicaid program funded abortions, for women who claimed they had been raped, without any requirement for reporting of the purported assault to a law enforcement agency. Under this law, abortion clinic personnel issued thinly veiled public invitations for women to simply state that they'd been raped, and the state ended up funding an average of 36 abortions a month based on such unsubstantiated claims. In 1988 the legislature added a requirement for reporting the rape to a law enforcement agency, and the average dropped to less than three abortions per month.
If women are going to lie about it to get abortions, what about the incredibly high risk of women getting backdoor abortions, illegal, unsafe ones because they don't want their child and there's no legal alternative? While that still happens today due to monetary issues I'm sure, driving desperate women to self-harm so they don't have to give up their own body for 9 months would certainly be a negative backlash of outlawing abortion.
In addition, while you can throw out those statistics, they can easily be interpreted in different ways which makes them not very reliable towards your argument. What about all the women who don't want to report a rape due to shame, self-hatred, being told they would have revenge exacted on them by the rapist, or any one of the other reasons that people choose not to report rape? Those could easily be applied to your statistics, therefore making them unrelated. Since you can't offer any proof that your interpretation of the statistics is correct over mine, which is also entirely valid, they're useless to you.
It is a human, 100%. Just because the law doesn't define it as such doesn't make it a biological fact. Cognitive ability does not define a human being either - a brain dead person is still a human being. That said, a child just recently born does not have the cognitive ability you expect either - does that mean you support the murder of infants? There was recently a paper published in an ethics journal that argued just that, because that is the logical conclusion of the pro-abortion argument.
After-birth abortion: why should the baby live? (2012)
My opinion on when abortion should not be allowed anymore is when more than 50% of children would be able to survive outside of the mother's womb. There will of course be children that would be able to survive but can't because of some kind of birth defect; that's what the over 50% would be for, based on previous premature births of children. It would also include the use of machines to keep a child alive, as premature children even slightly can need things such as an incubator to allow them to finish developing.
I've already shown that your biological 'definition' of a human doesn't hold up. Do you have a more exact one that shows how a fetus is a full-fledged human being?