Hi, pro-choice mathematician who’s done biology work here.
Fetuses are alive. Fetuses are composed of living tissues. If a fetus was not alive, it wouldn’t grow. If a fetus doesn’t grow it can’t be born. You will never win an argument with an anti-abortion nutjob if you get basic facts wrong. The reason a fetus doesn’t have the same moral weight as the human it needs to live off of is because fetuses aren’t sapient.
Strongly recommend not using this argument, or any of the ones showing up in this sub-thread. No one is going to be convinced on any of this. The people trying to ban abortion will never, ever be convinced by arguments about when life begins – and will likely just become more certain that the pro choice crowd are full of callous monsters that don’t grant dignity to life.
Read A Defense of Abortion, Judith Jarvis. It is the argument.
In a nutshell: it doesn’t matter if the fetus is alive/a human/has a soul/whatever. You can grant that it is a full human being with rights from the beginning, even. Our ethical rules place autonomy of your own body hierarchically higher than preserving the life of someone else. That must be true or else it would be perfectly reasonable to harvest extra organs from people without their consent, take any or all property from citizens without cause to give to the needy, or draft individuals into whatever charitable work you wanted with no due process. There are very strict limits on how much charity a person can be mandated to participate in, and that limit is usually down to transient circumstances and taxes. It certainly does not dive into your flesh.
The state has no business enforcing control over decisions an individual makes about the contents of their own uterus, even if those decisions may lead to a death.
Whether or not it is RIGHT or GOOD to get an abortion doesn’t even matter and, frankly, isn’t worth debating. That is a subjective question. All that matters is whether the state is allowed to step in and prevent it from happening – and they aren’t.
The only thing marking a clear difference between a fetus and any other person is the fetus’s need of the womb to live. And unfortunately for the fetus, one person’s need of some service to live is not sufficient to enslave another.
Arguments with unreasonable people aren’t won by making the unreasonable person change their mind they’re won by showing the audience that the person is unreasonable, which in turn shows their word can’t be trusted.
I don’t think any undecided audience will be convinced by this “mass of cells”-style argument either. But to someone who DOES worry that it is a ‘person’ being aborted, hearing someone else dismiss that life makes it seem like the pro-choice people are callous and uncaring.
If you’re arguing for an audience, all the more reason to be explicit and clear about the underlying ethical conviction rather than just a subjective opinion about what is and isn’t life. How this is about a person’s right to make the right choice for themselves, privately.
Either that or talk about the pain and hardship brought on by pregnancy, especially pregnancy caused by violence, and the benefit the abortion can provide. That can also be pretty compelling.
1 - it’s still stopping the existence of an organism and preventing a human life from happening after it already started to happen. Call it not killing something, but we’re basically arguing semantics. I’m pro choice, but I mean, own what you are doing. It’s not exactly preventative it’s reactive.
2 - idk and idc who this hitman guy is, I meant your usual death row guy who viscously killed/etc multiple people in a horrifying way. Someone an overwhelming majority of people would have no problem with being killed. Someone who has demonstrated we permanently need out of society and has spread suffering. I’m anti death penalty, but not because there’s any love lost with those people - only because we convict and kill the wrong people sometimes.
Well yes, but you referred to terminating a pregnancy as “killing a blank slate”. The use of the term “killing” has obvious emotional connotations which you were co-opting to support your position. If you’re going to do that then you need to be prepared to defend the appropriateness of that particular verb.
I meant your usual death row guy who viscously killed/etc multiple people in a horrifying way. Someone an overwhelming majority of people would have no problem with being killed.
You’re assuming that people generally support killing repugnant criminals, which is not the case. There are some truly awful people in the world, and they may well “deserve” to die, but I do not wish them dead. I think you may find that this is a fairly commonly held position in contemporary society.
Yea, once someone rapes a child and tortures 3 people for hours before burning down a house, I’m philosophically fine with killing them. I didn’t think that part was too much of a hot take.
Fair enough about you perceiving a connotation about the verbage, but also, it’s killing something lol. If what I just did to this ant in my kitchen was killing it, then it’s what’s happening to that fetus.
it’s still stopping the existence of an organism and preventing a human life from happening after it already started to happen.
That part I highlighted is a subject of debate, and since it hinges on opinions about the definitions of words rather than anything with a clear-cut objective measure it’s a debate that’s not going to be settled any time soon.
I meant your usual death row guy who viscously killed/etc multiple people in a horrifying way
What a good thing that the state never, ever incorrectly convicts people of having done those things.
When the cells form together and start developing, a human life has begun to form. If it’s “alive” you can argue about and whatever. But you can’t debate that first sentence any more than you can debate that once you put a pot of water on a hi burner, you’ve started to boil some water. Have some fucking balls and admit what you’re doing when you terminate a pregnancy. If I crack an egg I just killed a chicken. If I didn’t kill a chicken, by way of semantics, I still caused a chicken that would exist to not exist, what the hell are you supposed to call that?
And the thing about the death penalty, I literally said that in my comment. I brought that up as the reason why I’m against it. So thanks for restating it more sarcastically.
If I didn’t kill a chicken, by way of semantics, I still caused a chicken that would exist to not exist, what the hell are you supposed to call that?
What if two chickens are about to copulate, and I separate them before they get a chance to get it on? I just prevented a future chicken from existing, so did I just kill it?
This is what I mean about this being a semantic debate. There’s no way to objectively measure the “chickenness” of something, especially not in the grey area that lies between disorganized atoms and a fully-formed hen. I don’t think an egg is literally a chicken, at least not early in the chicken fetus’ development. At some point it becomes one, but nailing down the exact moment is not something that’s amenable to rigorous definition. We’re never going to have a scanner that we can train on a developing egg and have it go “ping!” The moment the chicken threshold has been passed.
To be fair, killing a blank slate is different than killing a guy everybody wants dead
2 problems here. Firstly a fetus is not alive so can’t be killed. Secondly I didn’t want that guy dead.
Hi, pro-choice mathematician who’s done biology work here. Fetuses are alive. Fetuses are composed of living tissues. If a fetus was not alive, it wouldn’t grow. If a fetus doesn’t grow it can’t be born. You will never win an argument with an anti-abortion nutjob if you get basic facts wrong. The reason a fetus doesn’t have the same moral weight as the human it needs to live off of is because fetuses aren’t sapient.
Strongly recommend not using this argument, or any of the ones showing up in this sub-thread. No one is going to be convinced on any of this. The people trying to ban abortion will never, ever be convinced by arguments about when life begins – and will likely just become more certain that the pro choice crowd are full of callous monsters that don’t grant dignity to life.
Read A Defense of Abortion, Judith Jarvis. It is the argument.
In a nutshell: it doesn’t matter if the fetus is alive/a human/has a soul/whatever. You can grant that it is a full human being with rights from the beginning, even. Our ethical rules place autonomy of your own body hierarchically higher than preserving the life of someone else. That must be true or else it would be perfectly reasonable to harvest extra organs from people without their consent, take any or all property from citizens without cause to give to the needy, or draft individuals into whatever charitable work you wanted with no due process. There are very strict limits on how much charity a person can be mandated to participate in, and that limit is usually down to transient circumstances and taxes. It certainly does not dive into your flesh.
The state has no business enforcing control over decisions an individual makes about the contents of their own uterus, even if those decisions may lead to a death.
Whether or not it is RIGHT or GOOD to get an abortion doesn’t even matter and, frankly, isn’t worth debating. That is a subjective question. All that matters is whether the state is allowed to step in and prevent it from happening – and they aren’t.
The only thing marking a clear difference between a fetus and any other person is the fetus’s need of the womb to live. And unfortunately for the fetus, one person’s need of some service to live is not sufficient to enslave another.
Arguments with unreasonable people aren’t won by making the unreasonable person change their mind they’re won by showing the audience that the person is unreasonable, which in turn shows their word can’t be trusted.
I don’t think any undecided audience will be convinced by this “mass of cells”-style argument either. But to someone who DOES worry that it is a ‘person’ being aborted, hearing someone else dismiss that life makes it seem like the pro-choice people are callous and uncaring.
If you’re arguing for an audience, all the more reason to be explicit and clear about the underlying ethical conviction rather than just a subjective opinion about what is and isn’t life. How this is about a person’s right to make the right choice for themselves, privately.
Either that or talk about the pain and hardship brought on by pregnancy, especially pregnancy caused by violence, and the benefit the abortion can provide. That can also be pretty compelling.
You would have a hard time convincing me that a newborn was a sapient being.
I don’t see how that’s relevant to the point.
1 - it’s still stopping the existence of an organism and preventing a human life from happening after it already started to happen. Call it not killing something, but we’re basically arguing semantics. I’m pro choice, but I mean, own what you are doing. It’s not exactly preventative it’s reactive.
2 - idk and idc who this hitman guy is, I meant your usual death row guy who viscously killed/etc multiple people in a horrifying way. Someone an overwhelming majority of people would have no problem with being killed. Someone who has demonstrated we permanently need out of society and has spread suffering. I’m anti death penalty, but not because there’s any love lost with those people - only because we convict and kill the wrong people sometimes.
Well yes, but you referred to terminating a pregnancy as “killing a blank slate”. The use of the term “killing” has obvious emotional connotations which you were co-opting to support your position. If you’re going to do that then you need to be prepared to defend the appropriateness of that particular verb.
You’re assuming that people generally support killing repugnant criminals, which is not the case. There are some truly awful people in the world, and they may well “deserve” to die, but I do not wish them dead. I think you may find that this is a fairly commonly held position in contemporary society.
Yea, once someone rapes a child and tortures 3 people for hours before burning down a house, I’m philosophically fine with killing them. I didn’t think that part was too much of a hot take.
Fair enough about you perceiving a connotation about the verbage, but also, it’s killing something lol. If what I just did to this ant in my kitchen was killing it, then it’s what’s happening to that fetus.
You said “a guy everyone wants dead” which is obviously never going to be true.
I’m sure this sounds odd to you, but in contemporary society it kind of is a hot take to want someone dead.
The ant is an ant. A fetus isn’t a human.
That part I highlighted is a subject of debate, and since it hinges on opinions about the definitions of words rather than anything with a clear-cut objective measure it’s a debate that’s not going to be settled any time soon.
What a good thing that the state never, ever incorrectly convicts people of having done those things.
When the cells form together and start developing, a human life has begun to form. If it’s “alive” you can argue about and whatever. But you can’t debate that first sentence any more than you can debate that once you put a pot of water on a hi burner, you’ve started to boil some water. Have some fucking balls and admit what you’re doing when you terminate a pregnancy. If I crack an egg I just killed a chicken. If I didn’t kill a chicken, by way of semantics, I still caused a chicken that would exist to not exist, what the hell are you supposed to call that?
And the thing about the death penalty, I literally said that in my comment. I brought that up as the reason why I’m against it. So thanks for restating it more sarcastically.
What if two chickens are about to copulate, and I separate them before they get a chance to get it on? I just prevented a future chicken from existing, so did I just kill it?
This is what I mean about this being a semantic debate. There’s no way to objectively measure the “chickenness” of something, especially not in the grey area that lies between disorganized atoms and a fully-formed hen. I don’t think an egg is literally a chicken, at least not early in the chicken fetus’ development. At some point it becomes one, but nailing down the exact moment is not something that’s amenable to rigorous definition. We’re never going to have a scanner that we can train on a developing egg and have it go “ping!” The moment the chicken threshold has been passed.
Any rights a fetus has are outweighed by the mother’s right to bodily autonomy.