Print

Please login or register.
1 Hour 1 Day 1 Week 1 Month Forever
Login with username, password and session length

[Leafsnail]

And what about the other side? If Roe v Wade were overturned and abortion outlawed on the grounds that a fetus has human rights, that means that women would be committing child abuse against their unborn children by not eating properly, not taking maximum care of their own health, and especially by drinking and smoking while pregnant. I think there would be a decent legal case to be made for this - creating "fetus abuse" as a crime parallel to child abuse (also fetus neglect - which the dad might be guilty of if he LET his wife drink and smoke and didn't do anything to prevent the abuse). And that would mean that women would be required to regularly pregnancy test themselves just in case they were pregnant and must therefore stop all fetus-unfriendly habits.

Because women obviously aren't human beings but, in fact, living incubators...

This means that if someone kills a pregnant woman, even if nine months pregnant, that person cannot be be charged with double murder.

A women can terminate her own pregnancy, but noone else has the right to...

[G-Flex]

Right, and most states have limits on late-term abortion anyway.


And honestly, maybe people should be responsible if they do horribly neglectful/harmful things to their unborn children. It's not exactly fun to be born with fetal alcohol syndrome.

[Jude]

And what about the other side? If Roe v Wade were overturned and abortion outlawed on the grounds that a fetus has human rights, that means that women would be committing child abuse against their unborn children by not eating properly, not taking maximum care of their own health, and especially by drinking and smoking while pregnant. I think there would be a decent legal case to be made for this - creating "fetus abuse" as a crime parallel to child abuse (also fetus neglect - which the dad might be guilty of if he LET his wife drink and smoke and didn't do anything to prevent the abuse). And that would mean that women would be required to regularly pregnancy test themselves just in case they were pregnant and must therefore stop all fetus-unfriendly habits.

Because women obviously aren't human beings but, in fact, living incubators...

What?

This means that if someone kills a pregnant woman, even if nine months pregnant, that person cannot be be charged with double murder.

A women can terminate her own pregnancy, but noone else has the right to...

OK, but that means that the killing of the fetus, as a side effect to killing the woman, cannot be considered a second homicide and the killer can only be charged with property damage or something else which isn't homicide. Same if someone spiked the woman's orange juice with some chemical that made her miscarry; it couldn't be considered a homicide, because it it could that would make the fetus human, and that would make the fetus have human rights including the right not to be killed.

See how tricky it gets?

And honestly, maybe people should be responsible if they do horribly neglectful/harmful things to their unborn children. It's not exactly fun to be born with fetal alcohol syndrome.

As a knee-jerk reaction, I agree, but I haven't really given it that much thought. And again, think about the implications: this paragraph is copied from something I posted in that debate I was having on facebook:

But if it is a woman's right to abort a fetus before, for the sake of argument, 5 months, then that means at 5 months the fetus gains its rights? but - if the fetus abuse occurs before 5 months, then what? how can the rights that it gained at 5 months be retroactive back to a former condition when it had no rights, not even the right not to be killed?

In other words, if the woman has the right to kill her fetus, then how does she not have the right to do things that will harm it if she doesn't kill it? Does the fetus have rights or not?

I don't even really have a stance on abortion, because while having it legal condones killing babies, having it ILLEGAL would unquestionably be worse for basically all women and children involved. I'm just trying to get people to think about implications of abortion laws that have apparently not been considered.

[Neonivek]

Abortion as a whole is in an odd situation because it is tied with Women's rights. (Hmmm Odd perhaps isn't the best word. Maybe complicated would be better)

Quite a bit of the debate on Abortion doesn't have anything to do with Fetus rights.

Though when it comes to Women's rights it seems to bobble between women's rights as a good onto itself and abortions preventing victumisation of women.

Though that is only my experience with a few people who really didn't understand the issue.

I really got to stay away from this subject. It really is a heart breaking subject for me (I don't have personal experience mind you)

[G-Flex]

But if it is a woman's right to abort a fetus before, for the sake of argument, 5 months, then that means at 5 months the fetus gains its rights? but - if the fetus abuse occurs before 5 months, then what? how can the rights that it gained at 5 months be retroactive back to a former condition when it had no rights, not even the right not to be killed?

In other words, if the woman has the right to kill her fetus, then how does she not have the right to do things that will harm it if she doesn't kill it? Does the fetus have rights or not?

Easy. If you, say, get drunk off your ass every day during the first month of your pregnancy, you're doing something that will hurt someone in the future, which is bad.

If you do something now that'll knowingly hurt someone later, you're responsible for hurting them. It doesn't matter if the person even exists when you create the initial situation. If I bury a bunch of toxic waste in a playground, and ten years later a bunch of five-year-olds go there and get radiation poisoning and die (let's pretend here that I'm a Captain Planet villain, of course), it's still my fault even though I haven't done a thing after the kids themselves were born.

So if you act like an idiot during the first 1-5 months, sure, the fetus has no rights at that point, but if you allow the child to come to term (or at least till whatever point at which it gains legally-defined rights), then you've obviously created quite a mess.

Basically, all that's necessary for you to have committed a crime is for you to do something which knowingly hurts anyone, even if the "anyone" who's hurt doesn't really exist yet.

[Zangi]

I'm inclined to take the side of leafsnail's pessimist viewpoint of what it could turn into...

Because women obviously aren't human beings but, in fact, living incubators...

By jah... it is hard not to comment on derailed stuff.  And I'm trying only cause I posted this topic.

[Leafsnail]

Eh, quote wasn't mine.  It's based on the "Pre expecting" cartoon, which is itself based on the story of a woman who accidentally harmed her child through drugs.  Although this is, to some extent, a seperate issue to abortion.

As for abortion... well, I don't support it.  I wouldn't recommend it, nor would I ask anyone I know to have one.  And yet I haven't experienced the desperate situations which would cause other people to consider it as an option.  That's why I'm anti abortion and pro choice.

[LegoLord]

We joked about the pro- and con- sides in Law ed when we had abortion debates.

Someone called the pro- side pro-abortion.  The joke was basically:  "Yeah, he's pro-death.  Wants all the babies to die."  So the teacher started calling it pro-choice.

[Jude]

Quite a bit of the debate on Abortion doesn't have anything to do with Fetus rights.

That's my point, basically. It figures into the issue in a huge way but nobody mentions it.

Easy. If you, say, get drunk off your ass every day during the first month of your pregnancy, you're doing something that will hurt someone in the future, which is bad.

If you do something now that'll knowingly hurt someone later, you're responsible for hurting them. It doesn't matter if the person even exists when you create the initial situation. If I bury a bunch of toxic waste in a playground, and ten years later a bunch of five-year-olds go there and get radiation poisoning and die (let's pretend here that I'm a Captain Planet villain, of course), it's still my fault even though I haven't done a thing after the kids themselves were born.

So if you act like an idiot during the first 1-5 months, sure, the fetus has no rights at that point, but if you allow the child to come to term (or at least till whatever point at which it gains legally-defined rights), then you've obviously created quite a mess.

Basically, all that's necessary for you to have committed a crime is for you to do something which knowingly hurts anyone, even if the "anyone" who's hurt doesn't really exist yet.

I get all that dude, but what I'm saying is that under the law, I can't really see my way to prosecuting the woman for doing it. How can you retroactively apply the rights that someone has now, to back before they (legally) existed? How can you punish a person for something that was not a crime, but somehow BECAME a crime in the intermediate time?

Again, I'm not taking a stance, just pointing out issues with the laws.

[G-Flex]

I get all that dude, but what I'm saying is that under the law, I can't really see my way to prosecuting the woman for doing it. How can you retroactively apply the rights that someone has now, to back before they (legally) existed? How can you punish a person for something that was not a crime, but somehow BECAME a crime in the intermediate time?

Again, I'm not taking a stance, just pointing out issues with the laws.

Ergh. I addressed that already.

You're not retroactively applying rights to the fetus. That would be like saying "What you did to that fetus at one month was a crime, retroactively". That's not what's happening.

You're applying rights to the being which DOES have rights. You're saying "What you did to that fetus at one month affected the fetus later in development, and that's a crime".

You are applying rights to the thing which has rights, now, not retroactively. The situation you created involved an organism which had no rights, sure, but that's immaterial. The fact still remains that you created a situation which eventually harmed a person with rights. It doesn't matter how you do that. You don't have to retroactively apply anything to anything.

[Lord Dakoth]

Okay, prepare for long, controversial rant...

I think that too often, people tend to just push the unborn child off to the side. I hear discussions about the right of the mother to have an abortion, but I think that the fetus should be treated more as an individual and less as a random collection of cells that may or may not be human.

One of the things that especially sets me on edge is the justification that the fetus, if allowed to live, would have an unhappy life anyways. This is at best a flippant, overgeneralized dismissal of a serious issue, and at worst, utter moral laziness and a complete violation of human rights and morality. You have no way to somehow predict how an individual's life is going to turn out, and I really don't think that humans are either intelligent enough or morally good enough to be allowed to decide that it's best for someone else if their life is terminated.

If you let an abortion child live to a point where they could understand the issues at hand, say 11 or 12, do you think that they'd want to have been aborted? I'm guessing that most of the time, the answer would be no. Life is too wonderful of a thing to take away from an innocent human.

If a woman gets pregnant unintentionally (but consensually,) I say tough luck. If you were stupid enough to not use protection, that shouldn't make another human's life forfeit. If you used protection but it didn't work, you were perfectly aware of the risks, and should take the consequences yourself, rather than pass them off to an innocent individual. Furthermore, allowing "on-demand" abortions isn't going to do anything to alleviate the teen pregnancy rate. Frankly, teen pregnancies are so common because there is little to no repercussion for irresponsible behavior. In short, the fetus isn't responsible for its own accidental conception, and it shouldn't have to take the "consequences."

In the case of rape, I'm still against abortion. Again, a fetus isn't responsible for its conception, and it shouldn't suffer the consequences. In this case, the rapist is responsible for the pregnancy. Here in the States, rapists typically suffer a few years in jail, but occasionally are imprisoned for life. I think that this is much too lax a punishment. For one thing, they are responsible for the torture of another's body, and often their mental stability as well.

Rape frequently results in the complete destruction of the victim's mental health, and the punishment should reflect the severity of the crime. Personally, I believe that the punishment for rape should be mandatory surgical castration. The victim has to live with the memory of being humiliated in the worst possible way, and the resulting child has to live with the knowledge that they are the unfortunate result of rape. It's merely justice that the rapist should have to suffer the same pain that they caused to his victims.

[/rant]

[ChairmanPoo]

It's worth pointing out that a fetus, an embryo, and a cygote are not the same.

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

[G-Flex]

Okay, prepare for long, controversial rant...

I think that too often, people tend to just push the unborn child off to the side. I hear discussions about the right of the mother to have an abortion, but I think that the fetus should be treated more as an individual and less as a random collection of cells that may or may not be human.

One problem here is that you're still thinking in terms of fetus. It takes a while of development for something to even become that. I mean, I agree you're entering sketchy territory after a rather uncertain point during gestation, but there's a difference between that and an undifferentiated clump of a few cells, or a fertilized egg that hasn't even implanted yet. Some people would like to even disallow emergency contraception, which is done before it's really anything more than a blastocyst.

One of the things that especially sets me on edge is the justification that the fetus, if allowed to live, would have an unhappy life anyways. This is at best a flippant, overgeneralized dismissal of a serious issue, and at worst, utter moral laziness and a complete violation of human rights and morality.

Ergh. Yes. It's completely dodging the question of whether or not the fetus has human rights in the first place.

If you let an abortion child live to a point where they could understand the issues at hand, say 11 or 12, do you think that they'd want to have been aborted? I'm guessing that most of the time, the answer would be no. Life is too wonderful of a thing to take away from an innocent human.

This is from the perspective of the human when it's a human, though, and doesn't serve as an argument against the abortion of a two-cell construct with as many human characteristics as any cells you could scrape off your cheek. At that point, it's like saying that you should ban contraception because any 12-year-old would say "no" when asked "Would you want your dad to have used a condom?".

The question is whether or not what you're aborting is a human life, not whether or not it has the potential for human life.

In the case of rape, I'm still against abortion. Again, a fetus isn't responsible for its conception, and it shouldn't suffer the consequences.

If you've been raped, there is ample time for emergency contraception to be taken during the period when there isn't yet any "fetus" to speak of.

[Neonivek]

what is odd about that is that people will often mention Rape Pregnancy as a very common experience.

Ignoring ways to prevent pregnancy after a rape (Which you do to avoid STDs) the chance to get pregnant from rape is quite low.

Though a lot about Abortion is clouded in Myth though I think this is mostly because people don't like to talk about anything related to sex rather then some sort of conspiracy. Most Abortion myths I know of are basically logical assumptions.

[Luke_Prowler]

*eats more popcorn*