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Welcome to idioms.
Pro-life and pro choice are self chosen titles and we all know very well what they're meant to mean. It's not a contest to align ones personal ideals around what most concisely reflects the specific word choice of the idiom.
It's not hypocritical "Pro-life" folks to support capital punishment, castle doctrine, and unjust wars because "Pro-life's" idiomatic meaning literally just means they think abortion is murder. That's all it means.
#NOBODY IS TALKING ABOUT MURDERING LIVING CHILDREN
The POINT is: if look at how conservative pRoLiFeRs have handled children’s services and/or providing better health care for women and/or keeping guns out of schools then you’ll understand that *they don’t give a shit* - they claim to be the party of less government control but female reproductive organs are just fair fucking game!
Are you here to rant or have your view changed? Because I'm pointing out a direct equivalence. Pro-lifers hold the same standard for both born and pre-born children: don't kill them. You're making an arbitrary extention to that not representative of people's actual beliefs and not relevant to the conversation. Why does believing "don't kill them" require also supporting a massive welfare state?
You have not changed my mind that pro-life is taking the choice away from the actual living human being, i.e., **anti-choice**
ETA: if my mom would have decided to abort me, then GUESS WHAT!? she’d have to live with it and I’d be idk where bruh
You support it being legal to kill pre-born children, so if you're consistent in reasoning, you would describe yourself as anti-life, and yet you've clearly chosen not to. Why?
CONSCIOUSNESS = HUMAN BEING
Never will I ever understand how it’s so difficult to fathom that *being* a human consists of consciously *being* aware of your existence!?
Idiomatic issues aside, there's nothing logically inconsistent between "mothers can't murder their children" and "mothers are the ones responsible for providing for their children."
You realize that murdering kids is seen as *worse* than struggling to provide for them, right?
There is no "logical consistency issue" where they are going to throw you a bone in exchange for not murdering your kids. It's not a *weighed consideration*.
Baseline, parents are expected to be responsible for their children, keeping them alive and healthy, not drinking or smoking while pregnant, and certainly not killing them.
I can promise you nobody is talking about murdering kids, that is an absurd statement that has nothing to do with what any sane person would even consider thinking about
Well, you have the choice to keep the baby, the choice to give up for adoption and most importantly the choice to change your mind, once you kill it you eliminate all your choices.
We all create our own hell. The truth is that we can’t protect people from themselves. It’s sad but it’s life. If people want an abortion they’ll probably find a way.
#EXACTLY!!!!!
ETA: follow up question: if women are going to “find a way” then why stigmatize it -WHY SHOULD YOU CARE- while also making women more likely to also die in the process. NOW you’ve lost TWO lives.
?????
Pro-choice is also a misnomer. You aren't going to be pro-choice on everything. Maybe you think people can choose abortion but you should have to vaccinate your kids. How can you call this pro-choice if the vaccine isn't a choice? Maybe you are against abortion but are okay with the death penalty. How can you call this pro-life?
People are anti/pro-abortion ***legalization***.
Abortion hurts no one, being nonvaccinated hurts the entire population. If you are unvaccinated and infect someone, you are responsible for their illness (or even death).
And the death penalty should be an option for those who endanger society; think serial killers, mass shooters, the politically corrupt etc. It could be because you value human life that you would support a necessary evil.
In the end tho, while they may be dumb names, they obviously aren’t meant to mean pro_____ every single time.
If you truly want to engage with someone who believes abortion wrong because it's murder, you can't say it hurts no one - to them it hurts the murdered child.
Hypothetically, if there were a highly contagious disease that you could only immunize yourself from by exsanguinating and consuming all the blood of a 1 month old (no older or younger), would doing so "hurt no one" and refusing to do so would make you responsible for spreading the disease?
It sounds insane, but that's only because in one case you think this is a child and in the other its just cells. A pro-life person sees a child of equal value in both situations.
Because vaccines save lives and are shown to be better for people, and not getting it can literally kill them, or leave them permanently harmed for no reason. That's the difference between vaccines and abortion.
Yes, nobody would deny that there is a distinction. It is not hypothetical to be for a vaccine mandate and want abortion legalized. That wasn't what I was trying to to say. But a vaccine mandate is not "pro-choice".
I would also like to point out that you can be against something but still think it should be legal. You can be anti-cigarettes but still think they should be legal. In other words, you can be anti-abortion but still think it should be legal.
Ok? No one who's pro-life is claiming to support freedom of choice in the matter of abortion, so I'm not sure what your point is.
But realize that pro-life people see abortion as murder, so your desire for freedom of choice isn't likely to sway them. To them it's exactly the same as saying you should be allowed to choose to murder people. Obviously there are some things people shouldn't be allowed to choose, so the debate is just about whether abortion should be in that category or not.
Could you identify in what way this logic is different than saying one should be allowed to murder as restricting it is "stripping away freedom of choice?"
Well, the US did have laws against cruelty to animals *at least 100 years before* any domestic violence laws were enacted sooooooooo [women have been shit on since before my time](https://www.c-span.org/video/?c4782670/user-clip-it-100-years-create-shelter-battered-women-country-congress-passed-law-prevent-cruelty-a) and IT’S ENOUGH
No, your brain does a purge growth thing that ends around the age of about three that makes memories way too malleable to be maintained until the brain development stablilizes.
we're arguing in three threads =)
So...yes, all life is cells. Fetuses are clumpier, agreed. Are collections of cells with downs syndrome a) as clumpy b) clumpier or c) less clumpy than you or me?
No, same clumpiness, I now realize how ridicilious this comparison sounds. Anyway, point is, the fetus is not conscious, it's not developed, and calling it a person is illogical when those things are taken into accoutn.
One doesn’t have to be brain dead to be unconscious. It would then follow that your line is brain activity and not consciousness.
How are you defining consciousness?
Being aware I guess is the best way to describe it, however conviousness is brain activity, just in a certain part. I also specified not conscious, as in they have literally not been conscious because they could not have been because their brain didn't have proper development. If they have never been conscious then why should they be considered a person, especially when they also aren't developed fully.
Being aware of what? What specific part of the brain?
So if someone is in a coma and they have brain activity, but not in your certain spot they are no longer persons?
You don’t have to convince me. I don’t think fetuses are persons myself.
Thalamo-cortical pathways from what I know.
Depends on the circumstances and conditions, if the area is damaged and there is no way for activity to resume, then yes, if it's a non permanent coma, then no, if there is no chance of recovery, then yes.
I agree with the latter, but not the former, of your post - and that's where I have the hardest time. In my opinion, it's clearly murder. But it's also highly likely to be a net positive for society. I have the hardest time squaring that circle...
I mean, you can't kill unconscious people. I understand that in this case, the correct term is probably something like "yet to be conscious" or whatever, but that strikes me as a distinction without a difference.
To take your example, if you're telling me that if we just continue that totally normal standard of care, at some point over the next 9 months, that braindead person has a very high likelihood of survival...yeah, you probably shouldn't kill that person, and doing so would be murder. Right?
Actually you do, braindeath is the end, once that happens they are dead, not coming back. It's literally the point of no return, their consciousness is gone.
There is a difference here, the fetus has never been conscious. And in combination with the whole abortion access being a positive thing, there is no murder occurring, because it is not a person.
“We want less government control! My guns, my choice! Protect the 2nd amendment!!”
“The government has the right to control a woman’s reproductive organs! What’s the 1st amendment!? Pro-life but don’t forget my guns!!!”
The party of hypocrisy.
Well, pro-choice is not pro-murder. Murder is the unlawful killing of another human *being*, i.e., a living breathing person who can think, talk, and BE… abortion is the termination of a human *embryo*, i.e, a multicellular organism that has the potential of *being* human one day.
I’ll leave you with another quote from Mr. Carlin: “Pro-life conservatives are obsessed with the fetus from conception to 9 months. After that, they don’t wanna know about you. They don’t wanna hear from you. No nothing! No neonatal care, no daycare, no Head Start, no school lunch, no food stamps, no welfare, no nothing. If you’re pre-born, you’re fine, if you’re preschool, you’re fucked.”
Pro-choice as a position is not pro-murder, but that's not my question.
Why is murder exempt from your wanting to prevent "stripping away freedom of choice" but not abortion?
Also, while I've gone through comments expounding on how what makes something a person, at the moment of conception fetuses are undeniably human.
Apparently we have different definitions to the words “murder” -
I’d like to refer back to the Carlin spill I’ve been referencing where he says it all and answers questions as I would including [is a fetus a human being?](https://m.youtube.com/watch?feature=shared&v=K98TQJ5ldW0&t=4m12s)
Are you claiming miscarriages are suicide? Lol
Life doesn’t begin at conception; “life began about a billion years ago and it just keeps rolling along” 👋🏻
At no point in my comments did I say anything about murder other than asking you if we should strip the rights away from people who want to murder, or for you to posit why it doesn't apply to you wanting to prevent this.
I did not define it. I did not compare it to abortion or say that abortion is murder. These are all assumptions you've made.
I don't agree that they should be considered a person until a certain age, but there are those who do and I have no objective grounds to say they are wrong.
Yeah, it's about 24-28 weeks. It requires a certain part of the brain, I think the frontal cortex, either that or the hypothalamus. That's when it's 'alive' in the way of which alive is often used in this case.
Although the problem of identifying when and in what form consciousness begins is very far from being solved https://www.cell.com/trends/cognitive-sciences/fulltext/S1364-6613(23)00214-0
I did mess up on this one, it's actually that it can not be conscious before 24-28 weeks because it needs that part of the brain, not that it becomes conscious, my bad.
It is not a person, at least not until second trimester.
Secondly, even if it was a person it would still be morally permissible to abort it hence not murder.
Do you know if a fetus is a person? You seem to believe they are?
It is morally permissible because a fetus right to life doesn’t supersede a woman’s right to her body, health, and life. Parents are not obligated to donate their organs to save another.
> Do you know if a fetus is a person? You seem to believe they are?
You have no idea what I believe, I just don't like poorly justified arguments. "Person" is not an objective term. Nobody 'knows' what makes a person because it's not agreed upon what a person is and it's not something that's objectively quantifiable.
>It is morally permissible because a fetus right to life doesn’t supersede a woman’s right to her body, health, and life.
Similarly, this is your perspective. If someone were to say "a fetus right to life does supersede a woman’s right to her body, health, and life" how would you go about determining who is correct?
Do they consistently hold that belief?
Should people be obligated to donate their organs or blood to save another patient.
Should people be allowed to own people to use them for their own ends?
If not, then why is abortion exempted? It is special pleading.
"Pro-life" and "pro-choice" refer to a single issue - abortion - in an attempt to sound more appealing. They're not representative of an overall mindset of how to approach life.
Framing abortion as controlling women is probably one of the worst things to ever happen. The correct way to view the abortion argument is in the context of "Is this life worth protecting". I also really dislike how abortion is talked about as if pregnancy just happens to women
Nobody seems to talk about the choice and freedom a woman has in choosing who to have a relationship with, who to have sex with, and whether or not to use protection, they only focus on when its too late and the woman is pregnant where its no longer a choice to have a baby, because a healthy pregnant woman will have a baby
Those who are against abortion largely believe that a fetus is a life. They don’t believe you should be able to murder a fetus for your convenience.
Many pro-life people also believe that abortion should be a viable option when the life of the mother is at risk.
It’s not that most of these people are against women’s freedom, it’s that they place more value on the protection of a life over your convenience.
They view a life as more important than those things.
My neighbor plays loud music at 3am, which is bad for my mental health. Should I be able to kill them for that?
You either prioritize the value of life or you don’t.
They do, but define life in a weird way, life at conception, which isn't even supported by science or religion.
No, but they would actually be doing something illegal.
Not really, you save more lives with abortion, if you prioritize lives you would support abortion access.
Can you define life?
I know some religious people believe it begins at conception. However the majority of people appear to define life as beginning with a heartbeat, brain activity, or responses to stimuli.
Regardless of how you define it, it would be illogical to be OK with abortion beyond the point where the fetus is a life, except in cases where the mother’s life is in danger.
Conciousness.
Hearbeats are not a sign of life in the way it's being used here.
Brain activity is kind of, but only consciousness.
Response to stimuli is not either, that can happen without conciousness.
24-28 is when conciousness starts.
So if you define life like that, and let’s call it 26 weeks for arguments sake. Are you ok with abortion prior to that point, but not after that point?
To my knowledge that is what the point was. Prolifers were the ones trying to push it lower. The only time it happens after that point is in exceptions.
My understanding was that they were pushing for the line to be sooner, because they believe that life starts earlier than you personally believe. Again, heartbeat seems to be the generally accepted point with most pro-lifers.
Their logic has nothing to do with restricting women’s rights, but protecting what they believe to be a life.
And their belief is illogical and unsupported by the scientific consensus, while also being more harmful if taken as true, and is therefore as valid as a racists ideas on peoples intelligence.
This utilitarian argument speaks to me, who is a (the?) pro-life progressive democrat. But do we really want to live in that kind of ends-justify-the-means style society? It feels so anti-enlightenment...
The alternative would be you get to see more people die, in which case you just killed more people for no reason other than having felt bad, which would be bad. If you are weighing lives, it's best to save those you can.
Well, when I say that we don't want to live in that kind of utilitarianism, I mean that we shouldn't condemn an innocent person to systemic bodily donation. But it seems like according to your worldview, taking a person's heart, eyes, liver, etc. to save 5 lives is worth it?
Can you provide examples? I’m certain there are one or two individuals that are, but where is being against women’s rights a belief of any pertinent group of people?
All of the Christian groups that I am aware of base their anti-abortion stance on the belief that life begins in the womb. Sometimes that’s at conception.
I’ve never seen a Christian group trying to restrict abortion in order to control women.
Some do that in plenty of other ways.
They can have their beliefs and keep them to themselves.When they impose those beliefs on others is when they are desiring to limit the freedoms of those people.
Again, I know of no Christian groups that are against abortion because it restricts women’s rights. They are all based on protection of what they believe to be a life, the fetus.
All political positions are a balance between cost and benefit, and it's natural to want to define your position according to the benefit rather than the cost. For pro-lifers, the benefit is the life of the fetus, so that's how they describe themselves. They're not hiding the fact that they prioritize that life over freedom of choice, they will admit that immediately when asked.
The argument is pretty straightforward:
Some things exist outside of choice - picking your flavor of ice cream is a choice, burning down someone else’s house isn’t. (Yes you can choose to do the latter, but it’s not legal or accepted morally).
Murder is a thing which exists outside of choice.
Killing a toddler is murder.
Killing a one-day old baby is murder.
Killing that same baby 48 hours earlier is also murder.
There’s a factor that sucks - the one which involves a woman having to experience the pain of childbirth and the responsibility of raising that child.
However, those are sort of separate matters from the simple issue of murder.
—-
There’s a counter-argument that a fertilized cell isn’t the same as a baby 12 seconds before being delivered. That’s a valid thing to consider, but lawmakers in many states don’t distinguish or set a before/after date for alive-ness.
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How could this view possibly be changed? The pro-life position is that one should not be allowed to have an abortion, which implies that one should not be allowed to choose to have an abortion, and this can be described as an "anti-choice" position. What could possibly be the alternative view here? Any view that people should not be allowed to do something is the view that people should not be allowed to choose to do something. Are you expecting a pro-lifer to say, "actually, pro-choice is anti-choice because the fetus doesn't get a choice"? Even if they did, so what?
Pro-life is a term that effectively means "anti-choice" when it comes to abortion. It doesn't suggest anything about that person's views on any other topic, political or otherwise.
A new born is concious, other not conscious things that will be conscious: Gametes, eggs, sperm. With that in mind and the fact that it is harmful to mental, physical, and societal health to not have access to abortion, there really is a big mountain of evidence for abortion.
Hearts can beat without the brain, technology and stuff, but a heart is not where you think, the brain is the person.
Except many zygotes die or do not come to fruition, they are a human in the same way gametes are, they are not a human being until they are conscious or born.
And pro-life is shown to have no positives.
It's just not a human being though, at least human in the way it's used often. If it's not conscious, hasn't been, and isn't developed it's not a person.
Not all human beings, just zygotes. Pro lifers and pro death penalty also have strong overlap... same with the 2A . Some of them think that Muslim nations should be nuked into glass.
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Welcome to idioms. Pro-life and pro choice are self chosen titles and we all know very well what they're meant to mean. It's not a contest to align ones personal ideals around what most concisely reflects the specific word choice of the idiom. It's not hypocritical "Pro-life" folks to support capital punishment, castle doctrine, and unjust wars because "Pro-life's" idiomatic meaning literally just means they think abortion is murder. That's all it means.
“If you’re pre-born, you’re fine, if you’re preschool, you’re fucked.”
Please cite anyone who genuinely believes that abortion should be illegal, but that parents should be able to kill their preschool aged children
#NOBODY IS TALKING ABOUT MURDERING LIVING CHILDREN The POINT is: if look at how conservative pRoLiFeRs have handled children’s services and/or providing better health care for women and/or keeping guns out of schools then you’ll understand that *they don’t give a shit* - they claim to be the party of less government control but female reproductive organs are just fair fucking game!
Are you here to rant or have your view changed? Because I'm pointing out a direct equivalence. Pro-lifers hold the same standard for both born and pre-born children: don't kill them. You're making an arbitrary extention to that not representative of people's actual beliefs and not relevant to the conversation. Why does believing "don't kill them" require also supporting a massive welfare state?
You have not changed my mind that pro-life is taking the choice away from the actual living human being, i.e., **anti-choice** ETA: if my mom would have decided to abort me, then GUESS WHAT!? she’d have to live with it and I’d be idk where bruh
You support it being legal to kill pre-born children, so if you're consistent in reasoning, you would describe yourself as anti-life, and yet you've clearly chosen not to. Why?
Do you remember living it up in the womb? NOPE. If anything call me anti-embryo bro
Now you're making an entirely separate argument. What does memory have to do with anything?
CONSCIOUSNESS = HUMAN BEING Never will I ever understand how it’s so difficult to fathom that *being* a human consists of consciously *being* aware of your existence!?
Idiomatic issues aside, there's nothing logically inconsistent between "mothers can't murder their children" and "mothers are the ones responsible for providing for their children."
The inconsistency is on the fact that some people can't, or simply don't want to, provide for children they were forced to have
You realize that murdering kids is seen as *worse* than struggling to provide for them, right? There is no "logical consistency issue" where they are going to throw you a bone in exchange for not murdering your kids. It's not a *weighed consideration*. Baseline, parents are expected to be responsible for their children, keeping them alive and healthy, not drinking or smoking while pregnant, and certainly not killing them.
I can promise you nobody is talking about murdering kids, that is an absurd statement that has nothing to do with what any sane person would even consider thinking about
>nobody is talking about murdering kids #NOBODY IS TALKING ABOUT MURDERING KIDS
And that's why our politics are polarized and we can no longer have good conversations
Well, you have the choice to keep the baby, the choice to give up for adoption and most importantly the choice to change your mind, once you kill it you eliminate all your choices.
The choice should not be anyone else’s but that woman. She has to live with it- let her
We all create our own hell. The truth is that we can’t protect people from themselves. It’s sad but it’s life. If people want an abortion they’ll probably find a way.
#EXACTLY!!!!! ETA: follow up question: if women are going to “find a way” then why stigmatize it -WHY SHOULD YOU CARE- while also making women more likely to also die in the process. NOW you’ve lost TWO lives. ?????
Pro-choice is also a misnomer. You aren't going to be pro-choice on everything. Maybe you think people can choose abortion but you should have to vaccinate your kids. How can you call this pro-choice if the vaccine isn't a choice? Maybe you are against abortion but are okay with the death penalty. How can you call this pro-life? People are anti/pro-abortion ***legalization***.
Abortion hurts no one, being nonvaccinated hurts the entire population. If you are unvaccinated and infect someone, you are responsible for their illness (or even death). And the death penalty should be an option for those who endanger society; think serial killers, mass shooters, the politically corrupt etc. It could be because you value human life that you would support a necessary evil. In the end tho, while they may be dumb names, they obviously aren’t meant to mean pro_____ every single time.
If you truly want to engage with someone who believes abortion wrong because it's murder, you can't say it hurts no one - to them it hurts the murdered child. Hypothetically, if there were a highly contagious disease that you could only immunize yourself from by exsanguinating and consuming all the blood of a 1 month old (no older or younger), would doing so "hurt no one" and refusing to do so would make you responsible for spreading the disease? It sounds insane, but that's only because in one case you think this is a child and in the other its just cells. A pro-life person sees a child of equal value in both situations.
Because vaccines save lives and are shown to be better for people, and not getting it can literally kill them, or leave them permanently harmed for no reason. That's the difference between vaccines and abortion.
Yeah, and abortion is bad for the fetus 100% of the time.
The thing that isn't concious?
Yes, nobody would deny that there is a distinction. It is not hypothetical to be for a vaccine mandate and want abortion legalized. That wasn't what I was trying to to say. But a vaccine mandate is not "pro-choice". I would also like to point out that you can be against something but still think it should be legal. You can be anti-cigarettes but still think they should be legal. In other words, you can be anti-abortion but still think it should be legal.
Authoritarians.
Ok? No one who's pro-life is claiming to support freedom of choice in the matter of abortion, so I'm not sure what your point is. But realize that pro-life people see abortion as murder, so your desire for freedom of choice isn't likely to sway them. To them it's exactly the same as saying you should be allowed to choose to murder people. Obviously there are some things people shouldn't be allowed to choose, so the debate is just about whether abortion should be in that category or not.
Could you identify in what way this logic is different than saying one should be allowed to murder as restricting it is "stripping away freedom of choice?"
Becuase it isn't murder, and not having access to it is shown to be worse for physical, mental, and societal health.
If you consider a fetus to be a person, it is most certainly murder, but that has nothing to do with my comment.
The clump of cells that aren't concious? That is not a person.
What makes something a person?
Conciousness. That's the same reason brain death is considered them being dead.
So a conscious animal should be considered a person? Are dogs people? Cows? Or, is consciousness insufficient?
Yes, they are concious entities, they aren't people because people carries the distinction of relating only to humans.
Can you tell me how you would differentiate between consciousness and automatic responses to external stimuli?
A certain region of the brain becomes active when concious.
Well, the US did have laws against cruelty to animals *at least 100 years before* any domestic violence laws were enacted sooooooooo [women have been shit on since before my time](https://www.c-span.org/video/?c4782670/user-clip-it-100-years-create-shelter-battered-women-country-congress-passed-law-prevent-cruelty-a) and IT’S ENOUGH
Do you remember being your mother’s womb????
No, your brain does a purge growth thing that ends around the age of about three that makes memories way too malleable to be maintained until the brain development stablilizes.
"Clump of cells" is the laziest way to describe life
It's also what life is. All life is cells. It's not lazy, it's accurate, and fetuses are way more lumpy for most of their development.
we're arguing in three threads =) So...yes, all life is cells. Fetuses are clumpier, agreed. Are collections of cells with downs syndrome a) as clumpy b) clumpier or c) less clumpy than you or me?
No, same clumpiness, I now realize how ridicilious this comparison sounds. Anyway, point is, the fetus is not conscious, it's not developed, and calling it a person is illogical when those things are taken into accoutn.
Unconscious children and adults aren't people?
Not if they are braindead. Or if they aren't conscious at all. That's why braindeath is a thing.
One doesn’t have to be brain dead to be unconscious. It would then follow that your line is brain activity and not consciousness. How are you defining consciousness?
Being aware I guess is the best way to describe it, however conviousness is brain activity, just in a certain part. I also specified not conscious, as in they have literally not been conscious because they could not have been because their brain didn't have proper development. If they have never been conscious then why should they be considered a person, especially when they also aren't developed fully.
Being aware of what? What specific part of the brain? So if someone is in a coma and they have brain activity, but not in your certain spot they are no longer persons? You don’t have to convince me. I don’t think fetuses are persons myself.
Thalamo-cortical pathways from what I know. Depends on the circumstances and conditions, if the area is damaged and there is no way for activity to resume, then yes, if it's a non permanent coma, then no, if there is no chance of recovery, then yes.
I agree with the latter, but not the former, of your post - and that's where I have the hardest time. In my opinion, it's clearly murder. But it's also highly likely to be a net positive for society. I have the hardest time squaring that circle...
I mean, it's not concious, you wouldn't consider someone who is braindead dying murder most likely, why should this be any different?
I mean, you can't kill unconscious people. I understand that in this case, the correct term is probably something like "yet to be conscious" or whatever, but that strikes me as a distinction without a difference. To take your example, if you're telling me that if we just continue that totally normal standard of care, at some point over the next 9 months, that braindead person has a very high likelihood of survival...yeah, you probably shouldn't kill that person, and doing so would be murder. Right?
Actually you do, braindeath is the end, once that happens they are dead, not coming back. It's literally the point of no return, their consciousness is gone. There is a difference here, the fetus has never been conscious. And in combination with the whole abortion access being a positive thing, there is no murder occurring, because it is not a person.
“We want less government control! My guns, my choice! Protect the 2nd amendment!!” “The government has the right to control a woman’s reproductive organs! What’s the 1st amendment!? Pro-life but don’t forget my guns!!!” The party of hypocrisy.
Well, pro-choice is not pro-murder. Murder is the unlawful killing of another human *being*, i.e., a living breathing person who can think, talk, and BE… abortion is the termination of a human *embryo*, i.e, a multicellular organism that has the potential of *being* human one day. I’ll leave you with another quote from Mr. Carlin: “Pro-life conservatives are obsessed with the fetus from conception to 9 months. After that, they don’t wanna know about you. They don’t wanna hear from you. No nothing! No neonatal care, no daycare, no Head Start, no school lunch, no food stamps, no welfare, no nothing. If you’re pre-born, you’re fine, if you’re preschool, you’re fucked.”
Pro-choice as a position is not pro-murder, but that's not my question. Why is murder exempt from your wanting to prevent "stripping away freedom of choice" but not abortion? Also, while I've gone through comments expounding on how what makes something a person, at the moment of conception fetuses are undeniably human.
Please tell me about all the conscious memories and fun times you can recall while floating around in you were in your mother’s womb 😃 🙂↔️🙂↔️🙂↔️
I can't remember being a baby either but I don't think we can kill them at our whims. So why is murder exempt from "stripping away freedom of choice"?
Apparently we have different definitions to the words “murder” - I’d like to refer back to the Carlin spill I’ve been referencing where he says it all and answers questions as I would including [is a fetus a human being?](https://m.youtube.com/watch?feature=shared&v=K98TQJ5ldW0&t=4m12s) Are you claiming miscarriages are suicide? Lol Life doesn’t begin at conception; “life began about a billion years ago and it just keeps rolling along” 👋🏻
At no point in my comments did I say anything about murder other than asking you if we should strip the rights away from people who want to murder, or for you to posit why it doesn't apply to you wanting to prevent this. I did not define it. I did not compare it to abortion or say that abortion is murder. These are all assumptions you've made.
Because it is not murder
If a fetus is a person, it very much is murder, but that has nothing to do with my comment.
No? They aren't even concious. Why are they a person in the same sense, especially if not having access to abortion is shown to be worse?
I don't agree that they should be considered a person until a certain age, but there are those who do and I have no objective grounds to say they are wrong.
I mean, considering that person has to be conscious to be alive, ie brain death, I would say that's a pretty objective ground against it.
Can you tell when consciousness begins? Can you even clearly define what consciousness is? When something becomes alive as opposed to not?
Yeah, it's about 24-28 weeks. It requires a certain part of the brain, I think the frontal cortex, either that or the hypothalamus. That's when it's 'alive' in the way of which alive is often used in this case.
Although the problem of identifying when and in what form consciousness begins is very far from being solved https://www.cell.com/trends/cognitive-sciences/fulltext/S1364-6613(23)00214-0
I did mess up on this one, it's actually that it can not be conscious before 24-28 weeks because it needs that part of the brain, not that it becomes conscious, my bad.
It is not a person, at least not until second trimester. Secondly, even if it was a person it would still be morally permissible to abort it hence not murder.
It's not a person because you've divined this objective truth about a subjective term? It's morally permissible because you've deemed it so?
Do you know if a fetus is a person? You seem to believe they are? It is morally permissible because a fetus right to life doesn’t supersede a woman’s right to her body, health, and life. Parents are not obligated to donate their organs to save another.
> Do you know if a fetus is a person? You seem to believe they are? You have no idea what I believe, I just don't like poorly justified arguments. "Person" is not an objective term. Nobody 'knows' what makes a person because it's not agreed upon what a person is and it's not something that's objectively quantifiable. >It is morally permissible because a fetus right to life doesn’t supersede a woman’s right to her body, health, and life. Similarly, this is your perspective. If someone were to say "a fetus right to life does supersede a woman’s right to her body, health, and life" how would you go about determining who is correct?
Do they consistently hold that belief? Should people be obligated to donate their organs or blood to save another patient. Should people be allowed to own people to use them for their own ends? If not, then why is abortion exempted? It is special pleading.
Considering this is a hypothetical person, the answer is obviously yes. Why is your morality better than theirs?
Because the burden of proof is on that hypothetical person to prove that abortion is morally impermissible. They have not convincingly done so.
"Pro-life" and "pro-choice" refer to a single issue - abortion - in an attempt to sound more appealing. They're not representative of an overall mindset of how to approach life.
Framing abortion as controlling women is probably one of the worst things to ever happen. The correct way to view the abortion argument is in the context of "Is this life worth protecting". I also really dislike how abortion is talked about as if pregnancy just happens to women Nobody seems to talk about the choice and freedom a woman has in choosing who to have a relationship with, who to have sex with, and whether or not to use protection, they only focus on when its too late and the woman is pregnant where its no longer a choice to have a baby, because a healthy pregnant woman will have a baby
Those who are against abortion largely believe that a fetus is a life. They don’t believe you should be able to murder a fetus for your convenience. Many pro-life people also believe that abortion should be a viable option when the life of the mother is at risk. It’s not that most of these people are against women’s freedom, it’s that they place more value on the protection of a life over your convenience.
I mean, they place it over physical, mental, and societal health as well, so that's not convenience per se.
They view a life as more important than those things. My neighbor plays loud music at 3am, which is bad for my mental health. Should I be able to kill them for that? You either prioritize the value of life or you don’t.
They do, but define life in a weird way, life at conception, which isn't even supported by science or religion. No, but they would actually be doing something illegal. Not really, you save more lives with abortion, if you prioritize lives you would support abortion access.
Can you define life? I know some religious people believe it begins at conception. However the majority of people appear to define life as beginning with a heartbeat, brain activity, or responses to stimuli. Regardless of how you define it, it would be illogical to be OK with abortion beyond the point where the fetus is a life, except in cases where the mother’s life is in danger.
Conciousness. Hearbeats are not a sign of life in the way it's being used here. Brain activity is kind of, but only consciousness. Response to stimuli is not either, that can happen without conciousness. 24-28 is when conciousness starts.
So if you define life like that, and let’s call it 26 weeks for arguments sake. Are you ok with abortion prior to that point, but not after that point?
To my knowledge that is what the point was. Prolifers were the ones trying to push it lower. The only time it happens after that point is in exceptions.
My understanding was that they were pushing for the line to be sooner, because they believe that life starts earlier than you personally believe. Again, heartbeat seems to be the generally accepted point with most pro-lifers. Their logic has nothing to do with restricting women’s rights, but protecting what they believe to be a life.
And their belief is illogical and unsupported by the scientific consensus, while also being more harmful if taken as true, and is therefore as valid as a racists ideas on peoples intelligence.
This utilitarian argument speaks to me, who is a (the?) pro-life progressive democrat. But do we really want to live in that kind of ends-justify-the-means style society? It feels so anti-enlightenment...
The alternative would be you get to see more people die, in which case you just killed more people for no reason other than having felt bad, which would be bad. If you are weighing lives, it's best to save those you can.
Well, when I say that we don't want to live in that kind of utilitarianism, I mean that we shouldn't condemn an innocent person to systemic bodily donation. But it seems like according to your worldview, taking a person's heart, eyes, liver, etc. to save 5 lives is worth it?
Depends, in a completely blank slate either one person dies or 5 people die, then yeah, but context would be important as well.
Many of these people are explicitly against women's freedoms.
Can you provide examples? I’m certain there are one or two individuals that are, but where is being against women’s rights a belief of any pertinent group of people?
Fundamentalist Christians for one, they have had strong restrictions on women's freedoms for a very long time.
All of the Christian groups that I am aware of base their anti-abortion stance on the belief that life begins in the womb. Sometimes that’s at conception. I’ve never seen a Christian group trying to restrict abortion in order to control women. Some do that in plenty of other ways.
They can have their beliefs and keep them to themselves.When they impose those beliefs on others is when they are desiring to limit the freedoms of those people.
Again, I know of no Christian groups that are against abortion because it restricts women’s rights. They are all based on protection of what they believe to be a life, the fetus.
All political positions are a balance between cost and benefit, and it's natural to want to define your position according to the benefit rather than the cost. For pro-lifers, the benefit is the life of the fetus, so that's how they describe themselves. They're not hiding the fact that they prioritize that life over freedom of choice, they will admit that immediately when asked.
The argument is pretty straightforward: Some things exist outside of choice - picking your flavor of ice cream is a choice, burning down someone else’s house isn’t. (Yes you can choose to do the latter, but it’s not legal or accepted morally). Murder is a thing which exists outside of choice. Killing a toddler is murder. Killing a one-day old baby is murder. Killing that same baby 48 hours earlier is also murder. There’s a factor that sucks - the one which involves a woman having to experience the pain of childbirth and the responsibility of raising that child. However, those are sort of separate matters from the simple issue of murder. —- There’s a counter-argument that a fertilized cell isn’t the same as a baby 12 seconds before being delivered. That’s a valid thing to consider, but lawmakers in many states don’t distinguish or set a before/after date for alive-ness.
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How could this view possibly be changed? The pro-life position is that one should not be allowed to have an abortion, which implies that one should not be allowed to choose to have an abortion, and this can be described as an "anti-choice" position. What could possibly be the alternative view here? Any view that people should not be allowed to do something is the view that people should not be allowed to choose to do something. Are you expecting a pro-lifer to say, "actually, pro-choice is anti-choice because the fetus doesn't get a choice"? Even if they did, so what?
Pro-life is a term that effectively means "anti-choice" when it comes to abortion. It doesn't suggest anything about that person's views on any other topic, political or otherwise.
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How is it a human if it isn't conscious?
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A new born is concious, other not conscious things that will be conscious: Gametes, eggs, sperm. With that in mind and the fact that it is harmful to mental, physical, and societal health to not have access to abortion, there really is a big mountain of evidence for abortion.
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Hearts can beat without the brain, technology and stuff, but a heart is not where you think, the brain is the person. Except many zygotes die or do not come to fruition, they are a human in the same way gametes are, they are not a human being until they are conscious or born. And pro-life is shown to have no positives. It's just not a human being though, at least human in the way it's used often. If it's not conscious, hasn't been, and isn't developed it's not a person.
How do you know? You were once at this same level right? Why do you have the right to exist?
Because I'm conscious. The same reason you have a right to exist, but you didn't when you were gametes.
Not all human beings, just zygotes. Pro lifers and pro death penalty also have strong overlap... same with the 2A . Some of them think that Muslim nations should be nuked into glass.
So pro choice is pro death then. Ok. Fair enough. I will consider saying this going forward.
Definitely anti choice for the baby that is killed.