No more than an infant being potentially an adult or a 16 year old kid being a potential adult — LostThomist

A 16 years-old is fully "alive and viable" in the eyes of the Law.

All the more for why the parents should get to choose. They've invested so much in those children it's only fair they have the choice of killing them if they want. — René Descartes

Perhaps you remember Marguerite Duras? Her piece on the Affaire Gregory, "Sublime, forcément sublime Christiane V" , where she seriously (although, didn't do much of a good job) defended the right of a mother to murder her child. "Who are you to tell someone who gave life that she can't take that life back?" or some such insanities.

She was publicly destroyed as a result. All of a sudden it became acceptable to call Duras absolutely monstrous things in the european press.

No more than an infant being potentially an adult or a 16 year old kid being a potential adult

So by that logic you are arguing for infanticide and overall genocide of anyone under 18. — LostThomist

As I very clearly stated in my original post, you are presenting a false analogy by comparing post-natal life (i.e. children) with inchoate, pre-natal life. Development-wise, they are not remotely isomorphic (the latter, for example, lacking a developed CNS, fetal viability, etc.)

Try again without resorting to fallacious thinking.

no..........it is NOT fallacious. Your claim that personhood begins at birth is no more arbitrary than me claiming that persohood begins at 18 years old.

I never said personhood "begins at birth". I said personhood, at minimum, requires certain pre-natal developments, which occur after 20 weeks including fetal viability, and a developed CNS enabling consciousness and nociception. The vast majority (98%) of abortions occur prior to 20 weeks. Explain to me how a non-viable, pre-conscious fetus is structurally comparable to a post-natal child. If consciousness, viability, etc. are "arbitrary", then why doesn't personhood extend to all other forms of life, from earthworms to roses?

Your claim that personhood begins at birth is no more arbitrary than me claiming that persohood begins at 18 years old. — LostThomist

And what is wrong with this arbitrariness? Just look at the word itself! Of course the Law is 'arbitrary'. How else could it be? Personhood is, once a legal term, after all!

↪LostThomist I never said personhood "begins at birth". I said personhood, at minimum, requires certain pre-natal developments, which occur after 20 weeks including fetal viability, and a developed CNS enabling consciousness and nociception. The vast majority (98%) of abortions occur prior to 20 weeks. Explain to me how a non-viable, pre-conscious fetus is structurally comparable to a post-natal child. If consciousness, viability, etc. are "arbitrary", then why doesn't personhood extend to all other forms of life, from earthworms to roses? — Maw

So then you are arguing for level of development.

Take care again: By this rule you are to be ended by the first man you meet whose development and self-awareness is superior to your own.

You say that A is big and B is small. It is size then: The larger having the right to kill the smaller. Take care. By this rule you are to be victim to the first person you meet with a larger body than your own.

You do not mean size exactly? -You mean that born human persons are developmentally the superiors of the pre-born and therefore have the right to kill the pre-born? Take care again. By this rule you are to be victim to the first person you meet who is more developed in his mind and body than your own.

You do not mean development exactly? -You mean that born human persons have an intellect and a consciousness that is higher than the pre-born and therefore you have the right to kill the pre-born? Take care yet again. By this rule you are to be victim to the first person who has an intellect and a consciousness that is higher than your own.

You do not mean intellect or consciousness exactly? -You mean that the pre-born are not as viable because they are still dependent on the mother and the womb and therefore have the right to kill the pre-born? Take care even still. By this rule you are to be victim to the first person whose independence is higher than your own.

But you say, it is a question of a woman's choice: and if she makes it her choice, she has the right to kill her pre-born child? Very well.... And if another woman can make it her choice, she has every right to kill you.

and if she makes it her choice, she has the right to kill her pre-born child? Very well.... And if another woman can make it her choice, she has every right to kill you. — LostThomist

But that's not how the Law works, nor how rights are granted! Your outlook on rights is completely dystopian!

These comments are killing my brain cells.

These comments are killing my brain cells. — Maw

Indeed, so could you please stop? Thanks. :hearts:

How's about a general principle that when a person's personal space is occupied by another - specifically that person A is inside person B, then person B is entitled to evict person A, even if person B is unable to support themselves or find a new home? If it works for houses, it ought to work for bodies.

Personally I am against abortion, I think it is wrong. I find it repugnant. I think it is an abuse. Arguments about what counts as a person seem largely irrelevant, and there seems to me to be no hard line to be drawn.

But there are many things that I find abusive and repugnant; that rich countries let people freeze to death on their streets, that bankrupt companies pay bonuses and pensions to directors while worker's pensions fall into a void and subcontractors go unpaid.

But while society does not value motherhood, childcare, and the life of every person in society, (when I say value, I mean with bonuses and pensions, with status and income,) I do not see it as reasonable to pretend that every fertilised egg is sacred and has full human rights to starve in the gutter.

How's about a general principle that when a person's personal space is occupied by another - specifically that person A is inside person B, then person B is entitled to evict person A, even if person B is unable to support themselves or find a new home? If it works for houses, it ought to work for bodies. — unenlightened

How do you square this with:

Personally I am against abortion, I think it is wrong. I find it repugnant. I think it is an abuse. Arguments about what counts as a person seem largely irrelevant, and there seems to me to be no hard line to be drawn. — unenlightened

I'm against eviction, but I don't think it should be illegal.

Here, for example is what one might call "social abortion". Shall we argue the toss about whether or not he counts as human? Shall we make it a littering offence or murder to discharge anyone to the streets?

Now, in this country there are too many women in the same state of homelessness, and yet we expect the to care for another life when their own life needs some care from others? It is shameful; the whole premise of this thread is shameful. Show your own care first folks, before you legislate the care that others owe.

I've said it twice now, and no one will engage.

If, you want to protect the helpless, If you want to uphold a universal right to life, to protection, If you are a closet socialist who thinks we have unconditional obligations to help, sustain, and protect each other, why do you pick on the on this one obscure issue, that just happens, if you are a man, to be the one that requires nothing from you personally?

[Delete] @Baden

I am not a socialist......and socialism has nothing to do with this argument.

My argument is not for socialist.....my argument is that all human beings regardless of Age, Environment/location,Size, Level of Development, or Degree of Dependency, is entitled to the same fundamental human rights to life,

why do you pick on the on this one obscure issue, that just happens, if you are a man, to be the one that requires nothing from you personally? — unenlightened

So in other words...........if I support life when it comes to abortion why don't I also agree on socialist issues? Is that what you are arguing?

my argument is that all human beings regardless of Age, Environment/location,Size, Level of Development, or Degree of Dependency, is entitled to the same fundamental human rights to life. — LostThomist

So in other words...........if I support life when it comes to abortion why don't I also agree on socialist issues? Is that what you are arguing? — LostThomist

Yes. If the old, the sick, the pathetic, the insane, the unborn, all have the same right to life, then you have the same duty to support them as you seek to impose on mothers to be. And that is socialism, distinguished from individualism.

1) Even if the argument were true, it would be ridiculous

Even if the charge that pro-lifers are only focused on birth were true, it would be a ridiculous argument. Imagine that you saw a woman save a drowning child. Are you really going to object, “Well, are you going to pay for his college education?”

She’s done an amazing thing, saving the life of a stranger. Criticizing her for not doing other good things is absurd. So sure, ensuring that children can’t be legally murdered for the first nine months of their lives isn’t the only moral issue, but it’s a darn good start. And if the choices are “I’ll protect you for the first nine months of your life, but then you’re on your own” and “I think it should be legal to kill you for the first nine months of your life,” that’s an easy choice.

2) The argument is logically fallacious

Again, assume for a moment that pro-lifers really don’t care about what happens after birth. Would that make killing an unborn child defensible? Of course not. It’s a logical fallacy (an ad hominem attack, more specifically) to answer pro-life arguments by saying that you think pro-lifers are nasty people.

3) The argument is unspeakably melodramatic

Think about what this objection is really saying. Usually, it’s that pro-lifers aren’t really pro-life because they don’t support this or that social program. That amounts to saying “you won’t give me money for this program? Do you just wish I was dead?” It’s closer to a teenage emotional meltdown than an actual political stance.

After all, in most of the cases we’re talking about, life and death are just not on the line. Wanting the education of your neighbor is a good thing. But not caring about your neighbor’s education or not caring if your neighbor gets murdered aren’t even in the same ballpark. So even if it were true that pro-lifers were just apathetic to your quality of life after birth, the argument still would be melodramatic and emotionally manipulative.

4) The argument is hypocritical

To the person making the argument that if pro-lifers won’t fund x program, they must want people to die: right now, on Kickstarter, there are people trying to crowdsource money to pay for cancer treatments.

Whether or not you’ve personally contributed to any (much less all) of these people, surely we can agree that you could do more. You could find a way to give a few dollars more, even if it means working a bit more or spending less on yourself. But you haven’t. Does that mean that you want those poor people to die? I certainly hope not. More likely, it means that you recognize in your own life that there’s a difference between not paying for someone else’s medical care and not wanting that person to live.

5) The argument is more than a little condescending

Bear in mind that the argument generally consists of telling people that, unless they’re willing to support this or that social program, they aren’t truly pro-life.

But it’s not like pro-lifers are somehow exempted from poverty, disease, and old age. It’s condescending to say to these people (in effect), “I know what’s best for you, and if you disagree, it can only be because you wish you and everyone like you was dead.”

6) The argument is demonstrably false

As I said, even if the arguments about pro-lifers not caring about what happens after birth were true, it would be a bad argument. But the argument just isn’t true. This whole “pro-lifers don’t care about anything after birth” is a gross slander of a huge group of people, and appears to be rooted in exactly no empirical data.

If you look at the actual data, a very different story emerges. I know of no comprehensive data comparing the giving rates of pro-lifers v. pro-choicers, since most places don’t ask about that when you give. But we can get some strong clues by looking at Republican v. Democratic giving, and at red state v. blue state giving. (Now, I realize that not all pro-lifers are fiscal conservatives or Republicans; but that’s the underlying assumption of this argument. But even that assumption was true, the argument would be false.)

So here’s what we do know. Of the top seventeen most generous states for charitable contributions, all seventeen of them voted for Romney in the 2012 election [while true, this fact is slightly misleading, in that D.C. would have made it on that list if it were a state]. And of the seven least charitable states, all seven of them voted for Obama. (You can see the data for yourself)

And that’s just one measure. Huffington Post, hardly a bastion of moral conservatism, points out that Republicans (54%) are more likely than Democrats (45%) to donate money to charity, and far more likely to personally volunteer for a cause (33% to 24%). They’ve also assembled charts showing that people living in “red states” volunteer more than those living in “blue states.”

So it’s not just a matter of writing a check: the sort of people who are most likely to be pro-life are also the sort of people who are most likely to personally lend a hand. And anyone actually familiar with the pro-life movement already knows this. Pro-lifers are frequently the first to sacrifice personally: adopting kids, counseling women in crisis, helping struggling families out of their own pocketbooks. And if you actually were to listen to the speakers at the March for Life, you’d discover that this is exactly what the pro-life movement, as a movement, encourages.

So the argument gets it entirely backwards. It’s precisely the sanctimonious “you don’t care about people after they’re born” crowd who are least likely to help born or unborn people in any demonstrable way.

7) The real debate is about the means, not the ends

While they may not be as likely to personally help out, it’s nevertheless true that most liberals, like most conservatives, care about the elderly, the infirm, the poor, and the disabled. Are there selfish people who don’t care about others, or are content to use disadvantaged peoples as political props? Of course, and that’s true on both sides of the abortion debate and on both sides of the political divide. But for the most part, there’s genuine concern for human life on both sides. If you can’t recognize that, you’ve let partisanship totally cloud your ability to understand or empathize with people who disagree with you.

Vice President Mike Pence, in his remarks at the March for Life, said

“You know, life is winning in America. And today is a celebration of that progress that we have made in this cause. You know I’ve long believed that a society can be judged by how we care for its most vulnerable, the aged, the infirm, the disabled, and the unborn.”

That’s a beautiful articulation of both the pro-life movement and political liberalism at their best: advocacy on behalf of those too disadvantaged to advocate for themselves. (One might add “immigrants” to the list of those for whom society needs to care, but the statement is still powerful as it stands.)

So the question isn’t “should old people be allowed to live?” — unless we’re debating euthanasia, in which pro-lifers are once again the ones on the side of life. The question isn’t even really “is it my responsibility for ensuring that you have a good quality of life?” Usually, the question is “how best do we ensure that the most vulnerable among us are protected?”

And the answers to that problem are often tricky. Social Security does a lot of good, but there are legitimate reasons to believe that our spending is unsustainable. Virtually everyone recognizes that healthcare is important, and that there are major flaws in our healthcare system, but most of the proposed solutions are expensive, untested, and complicated. Education is important, but pouring more money into public education doesn’t always correlate to demonstrate improvements. To demand, “you must support my particular plan or else you want people to dieeeeee” is ridiculous.

This is why the quotation from Sr. Chittister above is fatuous: she openly assumes that if “you don’t want any tax money to go there,” then you don’t want children to be fed, clothed, etc. This assumes a particular solution to these problems (taxpayer-funded governmental programs), and with it a political ideology. It evinces a grave lack of charity towards those who don’t share her views on the size and scope of federal authority.

Pro-choicers tend to be more liberal, and tend to be more trusting of the government as a solution to these problems. Pro-lifers tend (although there are numerous exceptions) to be less trusting of the government to fix these things — which may be part of the reason that they show more of a proclivity towards volunteering and working towards solutions on their own. But that’s a question about how trusting we should be of big government, or how much we think throwing tax money at a problem solves it, not of how much we love our neighbor.

That’s not to say that the fiscally conservative answer is the right one to any of these questions. It’s only to say that these are the sorts of issue that we should be able to disagree upon civilly, without accusing the other side of not caring about human life. Virtually all of us that we would like (amongst other things) a well-educated, healthy society in which the most vulnerable are taken care of. We just don’t always agree upon how best to get there.

So instead of saying “pro-lifers only care about babies until they’re born,” a more accurate statement might be something like, “although pro-lifers disproportionately give more of their time and money, I don’t see eye-to-eye with many of them on the solutions to certain social ills.”

But that argument would require nuance, and to view your political opponent as human, and as basically decent.

“... I’ve long believed that a society can be judged by how we care for its most vulnerable, the aged, the infirm, the disabled, and the unborn.”

That’s a beautiful articulation of both the pro-life movement and political liberalism at their best: advocacy on behalf of those too disadvantaged to advocate for themselves. (One might add “immigrants” to the list of those for whom society needs to care, but the statement is still powerful as it stands.) — LostThomist

You, me and Mike are of one mind in these beautiful sentiments. But this is not what you have been arguing in this thread. You can correct me if I'm wrong, but I understand you to have been saying that abortion ought to be treated as murder. Now I perhaps need to point out to you that this is an ad hom against women who have abortions and doctors who perform them. It is rather the nature of moral arguments to have this character; to say that X is wrong is to say that people who do X are doing wrong. So you are arguing that a bunch of people are murderers. But in my own view, that it is an ad hom is not a valid criticism of your argument or of mine, that's the way the morality cookie crumbles.

I agree with you that there is a vast difference between advocating what we as a society ought to do and not do, and mandating every individual on pain of imprisonment or worse to do and not do these things.

So I quite like that I have the right not to let the homeless man into my house and feed and nurture him for nine months, and I am not seriously suggesting that I should be guilty of murder if he wanders in and I boot him out with the assistance of my bouncer pal and then he dies of exposure. But neither do I think much of your argument that a woman who ejects a foetus from her body with the assistance of a doctor is guilty of murder.

So on the one side we have beautiful sentiments that we can assent to in a vague way, without being mandated to act on them personally unless we freely decide ourselves to make that commitment, and on the other, we have onerous duties that you seek to impose by law, and I do not.

Clearly you see the cases as being very different, but the difference is not in the right to life of the individual in each case. I hope you can put aside your outrage for the purposes of having a think about what the difference is.