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[G-Flex]

This here is a case for [A] and !

... Huh?

Also, your "B" tag got messed up.

Frankly even once a baby has emerged from the womb it's still less sentient (and I do mean sentient) than say... a pig (pigs are pretty intelligent creatures), and we slaughtered pigs by the millions. It seems a little two-faced to slaughter the pigs yet object when people kill off babies.

I can't tell if this is in support of infanticide or in condemnation of pork. You should probably clarify.

[Frumple]

Pnx is pointing out the hypocrisy involved in saying it's level of development that decides whether it's assumed to be morally acceptable to abort, I believe. It's not intelligence* (i.e. brain development, i.e. level of fetus development), because we happily slaughter creatures more intelligent than human babies (and especially developing, in the womb ones) en masse.

But yeah, Salmon pretty much hit the rest on the head. I gots ninja'd~

*Which is just about the only thing approaching unique about the human species.

[kaijyuu]

I don't think my belly button defines me as a person, so I think the baby is "human" before the umbilical cord being cut and thus has rights to life.

At the same time I don't think a fertilized egg is "human" so it doesn't have any more rights than a used condom.


Don't ask me where the transition takes place between "potential person" (no rights) and "real person" (right to life) 'cause I don't know and am unwilling to make a guess. Hence my massive neutrality.



The pig analogy is silly because if we think personhood to be determined by intelligence, that's a lot of really young and/or mentally disabled people that are no longer human.

[Frumple]

The pig analogy is silly because if we think personhood to be determined by intelligence, that's a lot of really young and/or mentally disabled people that are no longer human.

That's often a point made, though. Most people don't treat either of those as human. A kind of 'human-light', maybe, but not a fully functioning, complete, human being. S'a helluva' lot of discourse on the subject, really. Folks have been arguing about it for, like, centuries now.

[G-Flex]

One problem here is that "intelligence" isn't possible to measure on a linear scale, if it's plausible to measure at all. It's pretty meaningless to compare the intelligence of a pig, a person, and a parrot, because "intelligence" consists of a vast number of ill-defined faculties which overlap to varying degrees. There are almost certainly some distinct human qualities to an infant's psychology that are not present in an adult pig even if the pig can, in general, be said to be "smarter".

[Willfor]

This here is a case for [A] and !

... Huh?

Also, your "B" tag got messed up.

It was a reference to this post.

[ChairmanPoo]

Re: 9 months abortion: yes, it exists. It's legal in some US states, I think.

Personally I don't regard late term abortions ethical (I've no moral problem with early ones, though. Nor, for that matter, for abortions done to avoid risk to the pregnant woman, at any stage). I'd still nt choose it as a field, moatly because I don't find it an interesting job.

I'm not sure of the power that medical boards have in the US. In my country they wield quite a bit (many aspects of medical practice are self-regulated) and can in fact impose punishments on doctors for code breaches (and, for that matter, largely regulate themselves other penalties, such as negligence, and the like. They are quite powerful.) I hear in the US it isn't like that, though

[Darvi]

It makes me wonder though why they went through 9 months of pregnancy and then decided to just, y'know.

[ChairmanPoo]

It makes me wonder though why they went through 9 months of pregnancy and then decided to just, y'know.

There are plenty of possible reasons. Health reasons, hesitation, who knows. I found this on wikipedia.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Late_termination_of_pregnancy#Reasons

[kaijyuu]

What I don't get is why forced birth and putting the kid up for adoption isn't acceptable (for stuff this late stage, anyway). Seems closer to ethical no matter how you slice it.

[Leafsnail]

There are gonna be medical circumstances where that isn't possible.

[kaijyuu]

Well of course. If the kid or the mother's gonna die or something, you do what you have to do. Where that's not the case, though...

[G-Flex]

This here is a case for [A] and !

... Huh?

Also, your "B" tag got messed up.

It was a reference to this post.

What is with people on acting like they can assume that everybody on these boards reads the happy/sad/rage/disappointment/apathy/acquiescence/whatever threads religiously? I swear this is the third time that's happened to me within the past month.

[scriver]

...I would assumed the same no matter what the thread. It was just a reference. It could have been a ref to the Warriors or Planescape: Torment that almost noone would get - that doesn't mean I take for granted that everybody has experienced those and gets it.

[irmo]

Why in the hell would you hoard them in your freezer?

Because disposing of human remains involves a lot of paperwork. Usually aborted embryos go to a medical waste incinerator or are donated to research labs, and either way you have to document them. If your medical license is suspended, maybe you don't want to write "I performed an abortion at 36 weeks" on a form and sign it and give it to the county health department. So you just hide them in the freezer for now, waiting for the chance to dump them somewhere.

(...or maybe you do send them to a medical waste service, and they pick up once a month, so you have to store them until then. This is perfectly legal, as long as you have the paperwork.)