Print

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

[MonkeyHead]

I knew they were capable of problem solving (so are certain types of shrimp, even more suprisingly), but do they communicate? If so, then I geuss I will abandon my preconception that intelligence, social grouping and communication tend to occur in threes.

[Heron TSG]

As a man, I don't think my opinion on abortion really matters at all. I think I'll sit this one out.

[SalmonGod]

As a man, I don't think my opinion on abortion really matters at all. I think I'll sit this one out.

I have a hard time believing in this.  If my wife had wanted to abort our two children, I would have felt like I deserved some say in the matter.  In the hypothetical situation that she ever got pregnant again, I would be seriously concerned that the pregnancy could kill her, and try to convince her to abort.  I don't know what kind of influence men should be able to have in the matter, and I'm not even saying there should be legal recourse.  I understand that it's a tricky situation that can easily become subject to patriarchal abuse.  All I'm saying is that I don't believe it's right to behave as if a woman's ownership of her own body is the only issue at stake.

[Leafsnail]

It's just that when an argument gets brought up, it's good to address it on its own terms when it's possible. If somebody thinks capacity for intelligence is relevant, then I feel like it's better to say "Okay, but here's why that's actually a lot more problematic..." than to just skip right to discussing the woman's rights and continuing to talk past each other.

In this case though, Pnx is trying to expose a contradiction in a viewpoint which allows people to eat meat but doesn't allow infanticide.  In other words, his argument only works because he's misidentified what I feel are the usual reasons for allowing abortion (ie: assuming that whether you are or aren't allowed to kill something must be based on intelligence).  It's all very well addressing an argument on its own terms, but not when the argument involves a mistaken assumption about the opposing viewpoint.

[Frumple]

I thought the abortion debate was framed more in terms of "A woman has the right to decide what to do with her own body", since an embryo is pretty much a part of her and it's pretty problematic to treat people as incubators without rights of their own.  It becomes way more complicated once the fetus becomes viable on its own, but it's a completely sepatate issue to whether we should kill pigs or whatever.  Intelligence doesn't come into it, in my opinion.

As a general statement, yes, that is the argument, but a side discussion pretty much always comes up as to when/if unborn children (i.e. at any point from conception to getting out of the womb) are deserving moral consideration (in excess of the woman's right to decide what to do with their own body), and to what degree and form that consideration would take.

That pretty much always leads to people trying to set definitions on when the fetus becomes "human." Almost all (certainly all I've personally seen) of those either resorts to indefensible axiomatic declarations (It's human because I -- or <Insert Other Authority> -- say so) or have logical consequence that are blatantly ridiculous (See ovary point I made earlier re: potential) when you actually scrutinize them. If you had something solid (i.e. didn't fall into either of those two categories) on that point in time, the extent to and manner in which you're morally justifiable in suppressing woman's rights to bodily control becomes much more clear.

That'd be why the 'what is humanis a fetus human' thing usually comes up alongside or in relation to abortion discussions. The question on 'what is human' comes up from trying to identify what it is exactly that'd let us say "It is human now."

Even by your own semantics, there is no difference in capacity or potential between fetus->baby and baby->adult, MSH.

Ahaha, thank you, scriver. If A->B and B->C, then A->C.

[Heron TSG]

Excuse me, I meant to say this.

As a man who is not at this time in the business of babymaking, I don't think my opinion on abortion really matters at all. I think I'll sit this one out.

[SalmonGod]

Excuse me, I meant to say this.

As a man who is not at this time in the business of babymaking, I don't think my opinion on abortion really matters at all. I think I'll sit this one out.

Ok, I guess I sorely misunderstood you

I've run into the notion often enough that men shouldn't have any place in this debate at all, so I assumed that you were making such a statement.

[ECrownofFire]

Oh the joys of an abortion debate.

I suppose when you get right down to it, it's a debate of whose rights override whose (that doesn't sound right, there needs to be a way to separate those "whose"... fuck English). So then you get into the problem of what rights anything has, and whether or not a fetus/whatever counts as a "person" or "human". Now "human" is defined as a living member of the species "homo sapiens", so that doesn't really help much. Technically, a single human egg is a human. So just throw that out. "Human" doesn't matter. Also, a fetus is a separate (technically parasitic) animal from its mother...

So you're left with "person". Some say it's defined by sentience (self-awareness; demonstrated in non-human animals on Earth) or sapience (mostly defined by abstract thinking and/or philosophy or whatever). Going by sapience, you'd have to somehow find out when a fetus is sapient... yeah, not helpful at all. Going by sentience, you're just cutting out some of very unlucky members of the human species. Which doesn't really help either.

Continuing on, that leaves one thing: animals of all kinds have rights. Obviously, this leads to problems like vegetarianism... And that's ignoring how you would separate animals from plants and such (for myself, animism solves it). That doesn't help matters much at all, and that basically leaves you with... nothing, actually.

So really... there's no clear-cut answer until we can solve how old a fetus has to be to be sentient. Anybody up for administering mirror tests to fetuses?

[DJ]

I thought newborn babies can't pass the mirror test. Is it OK to "abort" them?

[SalmonGod]

This is why...

I'm pro-choice on the basis that it's a form of self-defense, not because I think there's some time period during which it's ok to consider the fetus as non-human.  Being forced to raise a child under the wrong circumstances can ruin a lot of lives, and adoption isn't a very good option.  I believe people have a right to defend themselves against threats to their quality of life.

[kaijyuu]

All this junk is why I'm straight neutral. I'll let the cards fall where they lie, and in the meantime, support things that help avoid the problem (more birth control, more sex ed, etc).


'Course I get people yelling at me that I'm "enabling" whatever they don't like (either allowing or disallowing it), but whatever.

[SalmonGod]

I find it much more mature to take a neutral stance on a subject, than to adopt one without sufficient knowledge to back it up against basic criticism.

[KaelGotDwarves]

More "happy" progressive rage to go with Obama signing the NDAA:

Spoiler: Google surprisingly progressive with gender "dichotomy" (click to show/hide)

[GlyphGryph]

I've been very happy to see that option available more and more often lately.

I still don't quite understand why the question is mandatory, but it's nice to have what amounts in large part to an "opt-out", even if thats not the intended purpose.

[Tellemurius]

More "happy" progressive rage to go with Obama signing the NDAA:

tell yea what ill give them a good reason to arrest me if they ever knock on my door.