Talk Elections

Explain to me why I should be against it in secular terms in my personal life so I don't have to come off as a monster anymore when I say that I'm personally "pro-abortion" in many circumstances. I don't really want to have this view but I've found no convincing moral argument as to why abortion is immoral. Let's see if you guys can give me one.

This will end well...

Ok, let me just ask this for starters: Are you an atheist?

It might be a bad idea but it's entertaining and gives me food for thought. :P

Yes. Spirituality is non-existent in my life.

I only ask because I used to be an atheist for a good portion of my life in middle and high school. I still cared a lot about philosophy and ethics and stuff though even though I simply didn't see any reason to believe in a God. For me, my nontheistic philosophy was built on the idea that this is the only life we have, there is no other, and that the meaning of life was found in doing what you love and helping other people through our short journey together.

Most of the time, I was pretty into humanist ideas and embraced most socially liberal positions. But one thing bugged me. If life was this thing that everyone only got one shot at and that it's all we really had, than shouldn't it be the thing most worth protecting and promoting? Obviously things like pacifism, anti-war, anti-death penalty and the like appealed to me for this reason, but when I thought about abortion I had to ask myself: Whether or not a fetus is a person, it certainly will be one at some point, and all of us alive inevitably trace our origins back to being one ourselves. It's a part of life just as any other stage of development is. If life is the most precious thing in existence, then why should we intentionally and forcefully deny anyone the chance to live? Why should we not allow everyone to live, love, and add their own beauty to the world and our short time in it? At least under a religious mindset, an aborted fetus would have some afterlife. But without such, isn't the denial of a life, especially one already growing on its only trip, that much more cruel?

That's how I looked at it anyway. Even now as I'm not an atheist, my pro-life sentiments are still built around this same core.

Do you favor abortion being legal at all stages?

This, and 'what are your feelings on sex-selective abortion?', are probably the first two questions that should be asked when attempting to argue that someone should nuance or change their position from this particular direction.

I guess it all comes down to how you define life and how much value you assign to it.

Personally, I've always found that the principled arguments weigh heavily against abortion. I find it hard to make a logically and philosophically convincing case for allowing it.

On the other hand, the pragmatic side and to an extent the moral intuition goes heavily in the other direction.

I've always been a bit partial to the virtue ethics approach employed by a female philosopher who's name currently escapes me.

I'm Pro-Choice, but I believe abortion should be illegal after the 2nd trimester and I also support banning partial-birth abortion.

Pro-choice is the rational position - you can't say that the POTENTIAL for something is that thing. Abortion should be legal until life is in fact viable, which is up until the third trimester. To all pro-life posters, I ask of you - would you make masturbation illegal? Would you have people taken out of bed in the middle of night and thrown in prison for having a nocturnal emission? After all, sperm is POTENTIAL for life.

I may dedicate my life to banning the term "partial-birth abortion".

Abortion is biologically wrong! It circumvents natural selection by eliminating the possibility of that life form competing for mates and thus, if being superior, reproducing itself!

I'm strongly Pro Life. I believe life is G-d's most sacred gift to humans. I believe life starts from conception. There is only one exception in my views, when a mother's life is endangered.

I've thought out the rape, and incest things too, but I decided I can't support those exceptions. I can't tell a daughter who was conceived from rape that her mother had a right to kill her in the womb.

My opposition to Abortion isn't just based off a religious basis. Hell,  that's only about 40% of why I oppose abortion.

As someone who has babysitted a lot of kids, and wants to have kids of my own, I cannot support the murder of the unborn. Kids are really the greatest thing about the human race.

Also, I believe the right to life is defined in the Constitution. ("Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness")


Oh, and unlike the candidate who I am supporting for President, I do support the use of contraception. Sex should be for enjoyment too, but it's primary purpose is to reproduce. 

There's so much more I can say, but I don't really have the time right now :p

Why would someone being born and growing into a fully conscious, living being only to have that inevitably snuffed out be less cruel than preemptively stopping that from occurring?

I know this is from last October, but I'm curious to see how this impacts the abortion debate:

Male birth control pill soon a reality (http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/3543478/ns/health-sexual_health/t/male-birth-control-pill-soon-reality/#.T0Epb_HQLpU)

By John Schieszer
msnbc.com contributor

SEATTLE, Oct. 1 —  — Forty-year-old Scott Hardin says he’s glad that men may soon have a new choice when it comes to birth control. But, he adds, he would not even consider taking a male hormonal contraceptive. Hardin is like many men who are pleased to hear they may have a new option but are wary of taking any type of hormones.

“I would rather rely on a solution that doesn’t involving medicating myself and the problems women have had with hormone therapy doesn’t make me anxious to want to sign on to taking a hormone-type therapy,” says Hardin, who is single and a college administrator.

For the first time, a safe, effective and reversible hormonal male contraceptive appears to be within reach. Several formulations are expected to become commercially available within the near future. Men may soon have the options of a daily pill to be taken orally, a patch or gel to be applied to the skin, an injection given every three months or an implant placed under the skin every 12 months, according to Seattle researchers.

“It largely depends on how funding continues. The technology is there. We know how it would work,” says Dr. Andrea Coviello, who is helping to test several male contraceptives at the Population Center for Research in Reproduction at the University of Washington in Seattle.

This actually isn't that different from my own views, honestly. I mean, I'll concede it's somewhat ambiguous whether you can call someone without a brain, heart, etc. a person but I don't really see how someone could say a fetus isn't "a person" without playing silly semantic games or using logic that leads you to extreme conclusions like say, Peter Singer's position.

Pardon the tangent, but I've seen people do this before - leaving out the 'o' in 'god' - what's the reason?

Belief that saying God's name is forbidden. Which is sort of bizarre, since God isn't even his/it's name anyway going by the bible.

I am a virtue ethicist, but to avoid rambling about subjective attributes of character I think one is best off making a habit of and internalizing, I would say from a secular standpoint most abortions are not morally objectionable until sometime early in the third-trimester of a pregnancy - at which point one would do well to take into account that a developing fetus/baby/whatever can begin to feel pain, and perhaps to some extent experience emotions and think. Until a human life is viable, however, it seems dubious to me to regard it as having full personhood for non-spiritual reasons.

Incidentally, one might also have moral reservations about abortion for reasons concerning why a particular abortion is being performed. Depending on ones political convictions, there may come a point at which a woman's privilege to choose conflicts with foundational principles of society. There is not necessarily a good or bad direction to err in when it comes to such conflicts of conscience, but it is worth bearing in mind that some of the concerns that come into play are secular in nature.

Imitation of Hebrew Bibles.  The Jews developed a custom of leaving out the vowel points in YHWH or replacing them with the vowel points associated with Adonai (meaning My Lord) which they would say instead when reading the Bible aloud. The substitute vowel points are the origin of Jehovah, tho the evidence indicates the name was most likely originally pronounced Yahweh.

That may possibly be the most sensible thing I have heard in a long time in regards to this issue. I applaud you.

Ah, I thought it might be something like that. I've heard of the Jewish custom of not saying God's name out loud, but I didn't know it's done by some Christians, too (assuming Santorum 2012 is such).

Sperm is potential for life in a different way, in that it's entirely unclear what a sperm might meet with, what other gametes might be involved. With a fetus the potentiality has already been realized in the first case and it's more or less clear what's what, since the gametes have already fused and the new person is already under construction.

Nobody is arguing that people should be punished for allowing individual gametes to do something other than fuse, and considering how biology works that is an absolutely ridiculous straw man.

You can't draw a boundary like that though. Both are the potential for life, but a sperm isn't viable life and neither is a foetus until around 22-24 weeks.

I am Jewish, I believe i said that on the forum chat thing before. But my belief in G-d is stronger than my belief in Judaism.

I support a woman's right to have an abortion. End of story. It's her choice to make, not mine and the law should allow her to make that choice.

I do not believe that a fetus has absolutely any rights, at all.  Since the concept of rights is based on man's nature, they're only given to fully formed and biologically independent beings.  A fetus is a potential person whose very tangible existence depends on the direct physical nourishment of an individual, so ultimately the woman is left with the moral choice because she retains ownership of her own body.  And the question to me isn't even about what is or what is not a human, specifically, since many things have human DNA but are not necessarily human.

Not only that, but far more spontaneous miscarriages occur with failure rates at between 1 in 4 and 1 in 7 pregnancies. If it were not in the nature for the female body to reject a pregnancy then abortion would be somewhat unusual and arguments could be made against it, but it cannot be argued against in the early stages because 'abortion' is in fact quite a common occurence.

I have a moral problem with it personally and would in general prefer alternatives to it, but it's ultimately a decision that I can't and shouldn't make for pregnant women. Legal and safe abortions should be available.

We should work to reduce the number of abortions by encouraging and oroviding contraception and appropriate sex education.

I don't like it, but as a man I don't think it's an urgent topic for me to have an opinion on.  So I don't think about it much.

The problem with that line of reasoning is that it can lead to atrocities such such as the Nazi Aktion T4 (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Action_T4).  (Can, not necessarily will.)


Conversely for me, the question of abortion to me ultimately comes down to the question of what we mean by "human".  If it is a human life, then the state has every obligation to act in a manner that allows for it achieve its full potential.  If it is not a human life, then the state has no business interjecting itself in the decision.  That is why I have no firm opinion as to when to draw the line between human and non-human, I firmly believe that the occurrence of rape or incest has no bearing on where to draw the line.  Whether or not the biological father deserves to rot in jail has no bearing on whether a life is human or not.

(If pressed, I'd allow abortions before the fetus quickens, disallow them once the fetus is viable, and hope I'm never called on to give an opinion for the period in between.)

Not at all.  Hitler murdered fully formed patients because of their physical illnesses, not physical state of being.  In other words, he murdered people who were already born.  Genocide and abortion are two very different things.


It needs to be a human that is, in fact, a person, because potential persons are only as such.  There is no 'right to potential life', because you cannot give rights to something that is an unborn entity.

To me, human life itself is a continuum.  Sperm and egg represent potential human beings as well, but the vast majority of them are wasted naturally.  But since the answer to that question is a matter of personal philosophy and religion, I usually argue that personhood is when an individual has rights.

The fetus is genetically identical, more or less, to the eventual person. The unfused gametes are not. I happen to think that that's a ridiculous way to define what constitutes a human life, but it's less ridiculous than some of the other ways.

So if Hitler had simply left to starve because they were unable to care for themselves, that would have been okay with you?  A large proportion of those killed by T4 were not capable of caring for themselves and thus were not as you put it, "biologically independent".  Also, get your terms right.  T4 was not genocide but eugenics taken to a logical extreme.

No, where did I say that?  What Hitler did goes against human rights.  I believe that in order for those human rights to apply to an individual, they must be functional outside of the womb.  The victims of T4 were people who were euthanized based on their physical disabilities.  It is not something that should be compared to abortion.

IMO the process of the development of life begins at conception and ends at death. Anywhere in between, one shouldn't have the legal right to disturb that via killing. Sadly, there are events such as wars that get in the way of the ideal. However, as a total, no being has the right to determine whether a fellow being can live or not.

I don't have a problem with abortion at all.  I don't think there should be a stigma against it at all, though yes, there are health-related reasons why proper contraception should be encouraged instead.

Out of curiosity, since you're using 'being' rather than 'human' or 'person' here, what are your feelings on human carnivorism? (Predation being inevitable in the world of nature, of course.) Necessary for most people's health, or regrettable and to be avoided on this same sort of basis?

Ahh, sorry, human. Over the years I've adjusted my speaking so that it doesn't really get specific & overall is more that of a politician's (using "I view as wrong" instead of "is wrong" us a common one for me). I have no objection to eating animals & rather enjoy it. Just ate what I'm told are pieces of cow & chicken for dinner & lunch respectively. Sorry for the bad word use.

It is interesting that you bring up natural rights here, as natural rights philosophy has been associated with the pro-life position since its development in the late medieval era. Man's nature is to be dependent and in a constant state of development. Much of the uniqueness of humanity comes from the fact that humans stay in a state of dependence to adults longer than any other species, and have a longer period of biological immaturity.  To limit the scope of human protection based on diversion from an idealized "self-owned man" is tantamount to a denial of human finitude, and thus mortality itself.

Man's development is only dependent when it exists inside the womb.  Afterwards, it becomes an independent process.  The "self-owned man" is not a diversion at all because rights are guaranteed to fully-formed, individual beings, not potential or collective beings.  A fetus- especially during the first few months when it is merely a mass of protoplasm that exists as part of the woman's body- do not, and should not have the same rights of the pregnant woman, and that of which lives inside another cannot claim the rights of its host.

Why are we having such a long discussion on this matter? I mean, abortion is an issue that has beaten to death, and frankly, we are all men here so who cares what happens with it? I will never understand politicians that walk around playing the holier than thou card with this issue. Keep it safe, legal and open to anyone that wants it. If a woman doesn't want a kid, no use forcing her to raise one because of some religious beliefs. Just let her abort it. Ive never seen men care so much about an issue that doesn't even concern us!

I still chuckle at that blue avatar, I hafta say. :P

This is of course the natural emotive reaction of one who does not feel that a fetus is in some sense a person. There are of course others who do feel that a fetus is in some sense a person, and who would view this sort of argument as similar to arguing for ignoring crises in countries that we don't know anybody from.

I tend to put my trust in the medical professionals who have said a fetus is not a human life. I think at some point is becomes lift, but at conception, I haven't read anything that tells me it is a human life. Of course, I will probably go to hell for saying that, but oh well.

False analogy. Haven't we already addressed that argument (on this forum, no less)?

Masturbation, although immoral, does not present the same issue as abortion, because in the former there is no joining of a sperm and egg. I also dispute your description of a fetus as a "potential for life".

Uh, I don't really have a particular horse in this game (I'm very conflicted on the issue), I just think that the pro-choice arguments tend to have logical weaknesses. Just...for what it's worth.

Im Pro-Life but not radically.

Why put your trust in the medical professionals who have said a fetus is not a human life as opposed to those medical professionals who have said a fetus is? 

Man's development is dependent throughout life upon the sources of its nourishment. If you lose your dependence, you die. That doesn't mean you're not an individual - Is a joey not a kangaroo because it hangs out in the pouch?  A fetus is a biologically distinct individual. An organism with millions and billions of specialized cells cannot accurately be called "a mass of protoplasm."

1. Lol at masturbation being "immoral".
2. If you take a sperm or a foetus out of its environment, it would die. Neither are viable life (well, the latter is, but only after 22-24 weeks, as I've said) and so it's nonsense to make a distinction between them if you're going to take the attitude that "potential for life" is the same as life itself.

Do you remember who I might be thinking of in my post on the first page? A female virtue ethicist who has written on abortion. I think it's something like Rosetta Hurst, maybe.

I am afraid not - sorry.

Most of my readings on the subject have been on Aristotle, whose ideas I adjusted quite a bit to mesh with my other views and compensate for flaws I see in deontological and consequencialist alternatives. Alasdair MacIntyre has wrote on virtue ethics, incidentally, but I imagine you are probably thinking of somebody else.

Both a sperm and a fetus are clearly alive. The question isn't whether or not there is life, but whether or not that life is a human life. We, regardless of religious belief, afford a different level of protection to human life than we do to other types of life than other types.

So when does life begin?

It doesn't matter whether the person experiences pain, murdering them is still murdering them and is frowned upon in our society. A bullet to the brain is punished less than the slow dismemberment of a human only as the latter is an added act of torture not because we only consider murder wrong if the person experiences pain. The ability to experience pain does not make sense as a marker for when a human life begins.

Viability doesn't make sense as the point to determine that a life becomes human because viability is dependent on the technology available and whether a human life exists depends on the natural of the biological material. It doesn't make sense to say that a fetus at a particular stage of development is a human life today because of viability when a fetus at the exact same stage 20 years ago would not have been viable. Yet they are of the same biological structure. And this may change even more in the future.

You could take any arbitrary point along the development process and define that point as where a human life begins, but in doing so you neglect that the fetus had a very similar structure in the seconds previous to that point and the arbitrary definition is just that, arbitrary. Then it becomes apparent that the best answer is found by tracing the human person back to its very beginnings, to where it cannot be traced back further and remain a single instance of life, at the moment of conception. This is not a scientific answer so much as a philosophical one for the reason that science cannot provide and adequate definition of "human life" or "person" such as to give an answer to that question because those are not scientific terms. Yet they matter.

Should it be a crime for a pregnant woman to consume alcohol, as this will cause harm to the fetus?

My personal opinion on this - and I don't think it should matter all that much since, as a man, I'm never going to have to carry a [insert preferred emotionally-loaded term here] inside me for nine months - is that whether a fetus is or isn't "life" (not a concept I think we should necessarily fetishize, but I digress) isn't important - maybe a fetus is "life", but I don't think it follows that it's therefore wrong to end it.

I suppose there should be some kind of viability limit, which is (obviously) completely arbitrary, but that's inevitable considering we're having a ridiculous discussion about fuzzy, abstract concepts like "life" and "personhood" that are by definition arbitrary, and that will never be resolved because there aren't actually such thing as right answers. Let's come up with a messy, unsatisfying compromise for all concerned and move on. Abortions for some, miniature American flags for others!

PS: FWIW, I think  that - slightly cliché at this point, admittedly - Flo Kennedy quote about how "if men could pregnant, abortion would be a sacrament" bears as much repeating as it gets.


EDIT: Quoting this for the ages -


There are people alive in the 21st century who believes this? Okay.

After a person is born, however, it no longer depends on living within the body of another for development or existence.  The resources that a person uses for survival cannot claim any rights of their own; water cannot claim it has the same rights as a person, a shelter cannot claim it has the same rights as a person, and an animal cannot claim it has the same rights as a person.  Such is not the case during pregnancy.  Potential people cannot claim the same rights as actual people, and potential must never be confused with actuality because they are two different things.  What can become an infant is not actually an infant, just like what can become a tree is not actually a tree.  Placing a bunch of cells under the same regards as an actual human being is neither practical nor morally just.

I scratch my head at some people here all the time.

Hypothetically speaking, what would our feelings be on the morality of aborting feti being gestated in vitro, were such a thing to become technologically feasible? They'd be, technically speaking, biologically independent of the mother (perhaps to a fault).

I wish I'd noticed that I apparently switched from the plural of "person" to the singular halfway through the sentence. D'oh. :P


I wouldn't personally have a problem with it, but I imagine a lot of people might.

I, uh, know that's not exactly an answer that's going to win me the Nobel Prize, but there you go. ;)

You mean like in Brave New World, or how the Jove in EVE Online reproduce?  I could go for that.  Especially if we perfect cloning.

I was actually thinking of a Japanese sci-fi detective novel I just read, and the general desirability of such a situation (low, I think, as it happens) wasn't really what I was asking about. For the people whose justification of the abortion right has to do with the fetus' dependency on another body, in this situation would they, and why would they, think that this justification would hold up?

This is more or less my viewpoint.

Am I the only one that views the "abortion is inconsequential to me because I'm a man" argument to be bunk? Abortion or a lack of abortion will have consequences for males, even if they're not directly impacted by the issue. A man could be in a relationship and have a dispute with his significant other over abortion and it would still be an important concern for him even if he wouldn't have to struggle with the hardships of actually bearing a child.

I feel like the "I'm a man" argument is a way to avoid responsibility.

You're confusing viable life with potential for life. The fact that a fetus isn't viable does not mean that it isn't a life or that it only serves as "potential for life". I'd argue that the status of a fetus as viable/non-viable shouldn't even be an issue at all.

(You also still haven't explained what you mean by "potential for life." A fetus can't be a potential for a human life when it is a human life already.)

I wouldn't be surprised if this was one of the arguments put forth in favor of prohibition.  Of course, there they decided to ban everyone drinking alcohol, not just pregnant women.  That suggests a simple-minded approach.  Instead of banning pregnant women from getting an abortion, ban everyone from getting them.

My view is that, as long as the fetus can't survive outside of the womb, it is still quite literally a part of the mother, and her right to bodily autonomy should be absolute.  At the point where the fetus has developed enough to survive outside, which I guess is around the beginning of the third trimester in most cases, then it makes sense to consider it a separate individual human, who then is endowed with all the rights and protections of the law.

This is, by the way, far far earlier than most societies throughout history.  Infanticide and infant mortality were very common, and children were often not even named until a year or two old, when they had proved they already had a chance to "make it" in a much more difficult world.

And if you try to push this line back much further, you end up with a position that's impossible to reconcile with the science of the matter.  Something like half of all pregnancies end up as miscarriages, many of them even before the woman knows she is pregnant, so even without abortion a huge proportion of fertilized eggs will never develop to viability.  (To say nothing of the fertilized eggs which never even implant, probably even a larger proportion than that.)  And if there's a miscarriage, the fetus will often be reabsorbed by the mother: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vanishing_twin

Even more damning for the idea that "life begins at conception" is the existence of chimeras: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chimera_%28genetics%29  Basically, two zygotes fuse into one individual, and yes human chimeras exist.  If I'm a chimera (and you may never find out unless you need a blood transfusion or you're born intersex or something), does that mean I have double the soul power of a normal person?!

I used to be very sympathetic to the "pro-life" view.  Then I learned some facts.

So, what is your position on breast feeding?
The interesting thing about this question is that it points to the continuity between the fetus and the born child. You might say "It's her body she can do whatever she likes" but then once the child is born and has a damaging condition, has any wrong been done?
The government isn't competent to track the alcohol consumption of every pregnant woman, and I absolutely wouldn't want it to try. But at levels that would damage the child's development, it is an abrogation of that child's rights, and I think the law should have some role here.

We've had pregnant ladies subjected to additional charges beyond basic drug use for using illegal drugs while pregnant.  Wouldn't be much of a stretch to do the same for heavy alcohol use during pregnancy.

My view is "who cares?"

It shouldn't be the government's choice, rather the choice of the individual.

The hoff is back!

Well they're qualitatively different because illegal drugs are already illegal. There's a huge difference between tougher sentencing for existing crimes based on circumstances, and creating an entirely new crime where none existed before. I am very wary of legislating on the behavior of pregnant women because it infringes on the same principle that legislating abortion infringes on, which is bodily autonomy. Essentially we are saying that as soon as a woman becomes pregnant, the State becomes the guardian of her womb and can tell her what to do. This is the same problem with all 'pro-life' reasoning.

Society should do everything that it can to encourage healthy behavior in pregnant women, but the line should be drawn at coercion. I would rather focus on providing pregnant women with the resources to do the right thing on their own; by encouraging employers to allow them to take time off work without penalty, for example. The US the only developed country where paid family and medical leave is not well established.

I must confess, while I have no problems with "right to choose" principle, I have some serious doubts about late-term, not to mention partial-birth, abortions.

Again, I may dedicate my short time on this planet to eradicating the phrase "partial-birth" abortion.

I have thought more on the issue. I think if the pregnancy is the result of rape or any other form of sex where consent was not sought or granted, then the woman has EVERY right to have an abortion. The life of the mother must also be a key element in determining rights.

I'm fully supportive of the right to legal abortion in the first trimester, but once you get beyond that point, assuming the fore mentioned rape/incest/life of the mother issues are not there, a degree of responsibility comes into it. By 3 months, you know you're pregnant, if you cannot come to a decision? Then you should deal with the responsibility. Beyond that point, I think it should be based on a medical determination.

If the foetus has reached the point of viability outside of the womb, then induced birth/caesarian and adoption is the better option.

I don't understand why anyone would support late-term abortions for any other reason besides some kind of disability that would likely lead to almost immediate death at birth.

I suppose I'm trying to think about the rights as well as reasonable levels of responsibility.

But of course one way to avoid abortions is proper access to birth control and adequate family planning resources.

But this is purely personal.

I don't get it.  Who (or what) was the hoff?

This more or less is where I stand on it. The same reason I oppose the death penalty is the exact reason I oppose abortion. I feel my right to life from when I was just conceived to when I was about to come out of my mother's womb to if I'm ever serving life in jail should be protected. 

And I'm an atheist(If that's even relevant)