Why Abortion is Immoral

[redleghunter]

That facts that are not in dispute are what the cells are like, what they grow into if all goes well.
The conclusion that is a matter of opinion is whether the first few cells qualify, at that point, as a person.

I thought we discussed that personhood is a philosophical term. I was keeping with the medical journals and textbooks. Both define a newly conceived embryo as a new human being. The left has turned 'personhood' into a subjective drill to suit political and psychological operational goals. Just as did slave states not giving Black slaves full personhood.

 

[VirOptimus]

-snip- The left has turned 'personhood' into a subjective drill to suit political and psychological operational goals. -snip-

And those goals are?

 

[redleghunter]

And those goals are?

I mentioned such in previous posts. The goal is dehumanize. Same goal as the slave states and the same goals of despots who wanted to dispense of their supposed 'problem' ethnic groups.

 

[Beechwell]

I thought we discussed that personhood is a philosophical terms term. I was keeping with the medical journals and textbooks. Both define a newly conceived embryo as a new human being. The left has turned 'personhood' into a subjective drill to suit political and psychological operational goals. Just as did slave states not giving Black slaves full personhood.

I have my doubts that medical publications universality define a fertilized egg as a full human being. The article you linked earlier even complains about other scientists yang the term "fertilized egg" rather than human being - so obviously the naming is not entirely agreed upon.

But be that as it may, it is entirely irrelevant for two reasons :
* biological definitions like this are made for convenience sake, to have simple and easily recognisable terms for scientific purposes. They are not made to capture the "true nature" of a being or something like that.
* since abortion is a moral issue, purely biological definitions are entirely useless for our purpose. We do need a philosophical definition.

 

[patricius79]

I mentioned such in previous posts. The goal is dehumanize. Same goal as the slave states and the same goals of despots who wanted to dispense of their supposed 'problem' ethnic groups.

As well as dispensing with those with mental disabilities. Once one irrationally denies that life begins at conception, one could begin to make allowances for infanticide, euthanasia, killing people in comas, or killing the developmentally delayed or mentally ill.

 

[patricius79]

I thought we discussed that personhood is a philosophical term. I was keeping with the medical journals and textbooks. Both define a newly conceived embryo as a new human being. The left has turned 'personhood' into a subjective drill to suit political and psychological operational goals. Just as did slave states not giving Black slaves full personhood.

Right and it's not difficult to define personhood. A person is a being with an inherent capacity to reason, choose, express, pray, etc, whether or not one is functionally capable of these things.

 

[Laury]

A person is a being with an inherent capacity to reason, choose, express, pray, etc, whether or not one is functionally capable of these things.

This seems to be a contradiction to me.

You can't have the requirement "being able to reason etc. without actually being able to do so".

The difference here is that a disabled person is capable of feelings, thoughts etc., even if it's not to the extend a mentally healthy person is capable of.
A fetus at the stage of 1-2 months doesn't have that, because it didn't even develop a brain yet.

 

[redleghunter]

I have my doubts that medical publications universality define a fertilized egg as a full human being. The article you linked earlier even complains about other scientists yang the term "fertilized egg" rather than human being - so obviously the naming is not entirely agreed upon.

But be that as it may, it is entirely irrelevant for two reasons :
* biological definitions like this are made for convenience sake, to have simple and easily recognisable terms for scientific purposes. They are not made to capture the "true nature" of a being or something like that.
* since abortion is a moral issue, purely biological definitions are entirely useless for our purpose. We do need a philosophical definition.

Well Peter Singer an abortion advocate agrees with me:

Peter Singer, contemporary philosopher and public abortion advocate, joins the chorus in his book, Practical Ethics. He writes:

It is possible to give ‘human being’ a precise meaning. We can use it as equivalent to ‘member of the species Homo sapiens’. Whether a being is a member of a given species is something that can be determined scientifically, by an examination of the nature of the chromosomes in the cells of living organisms. In this sense there is no doubt that from the first moments of its existence an embryo conceived from human sperm and eggs is a human being. (Peter Singer, Practical Ethics, 2nd ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993, 2008), 85-86.)

 

[patricius79]

This seems to be a contradiction to me.

You can't have the requirement "being able to reason etc. without actually being able to do so".
.

That's not what I said. I said the inherent capacity to reason and love, even if one is not functionally able to do so. Common sense tells us that a zygote could not develop the functional capacity to reason and love unless her/she were already a person.

 

[ToddNotTodd]

That's not what I said. I said the inherent capacity to reason and love, even if one is not functionally able to do so. Common sense tells us that a zygote could not develop the functional capacity to reason and love unless her/she were already a person.

No, the most you can say is that a first trimester fetus could be a "potential person". You don't define things by traits they could have but don't currently have. My car cannot now be called a "rust bucket", even though it has the potential to be one.

 

[patricius79]

No, the most you can say is that a first trimester fetus could be a "potential person". You don't define things by traits they could have but don't currently have. My car cannot now be called a "rust bucket", even though it has the potential to be one.

Your car could not become a rust bucket of car unless it were already a car. A zygote could not develop personal functions unless they are already persons. It's common sense.

 

[ToddNotTodd]

Your car could not become a rust bucket of car unless it were already a car. A zygote could not develop personal functions unless they are already persons. It's common sense.

Your "common sense" makes no sense. Once again, you can't define something based on a trait they don't have. My car isn't a rust bucket because it's not covered in rust. A first trimester fetus isn't a person because it doesn't have higher brain functions.

That's what's common sense...

 

[Uncle Siggy]

I thought we discussed that personhood is a philosophical term.

You're required to say that at least 7 times before some can remember you said that...

 

[redleghunter]

Your "common sense" makes no sense. Once again, you can't define something based on a trait they don't have. My car isn't a rust bucket because it's not covered in rust. A first trimester fetus isn't a person because it doesn't have higher brain functions.

That's what's common sense...

What do you base your claims on?

 

[ToddNotTodd]

What do you base your claims on?

The fact that what makes us "us" is our higher brain functions. If you were able to remove someone's brain and put it in a human-like robot, while at the same time keeping the body alive via machines, where would the person reside?

 

[patricius79]

Your "common sense" makes no sense. Once again, you can't define something based on a trait they don't have. My car isn't a rust bucket because it's not covered in rust. A first trimester fetus isn't a person because it doesn't have higher brain functions.

That's what's common sense...

Again, your car couldn't become a rust bucket of a car unless it were already a car. We're not defining someone by a trait they don't have. We are defining someone by what they are (persons), based on their inherent capacity for developing personal functions. Nobody said your car is a rust bucket. A zygote--or a person in a coma--is as much a human as you or Ibecause they are the kind of beings--persons--which have the inherent capacity for personal functions (reasoning, choice, love, prayer).

 

[redleghunter]

The fact that what makes us "us" is our higher brain functions. If you were able to remove someone's brain and put it in a human-like robot, while at the same time keeping the body alive via machines, where would the person reside?

That is speculation unless you believe in science fiction animation.

Plus there is not 'higher brain function' until the child is roughly 24-36 months old.. That would be after birth.

Your subjective 'consciousness' theory fails as there can be thousands of opinions of what makes 'us.'

Science clearly shows us that our classification of 'human being' begins at conception.

 

[patricius79]

That is speculation unless you believe in science fiction animation.

Plus there is not 'higher brain function' until the child is roughly 24-36 months old.. That would be after birth.

Your subjective 'consciousness' theory fails as there can be thousands of opinions of what makes 'us.'

Science clearly shows us that our classification of 'human being' begins at conception.

I wonder if there are, in fact, many people who don't have much of a problem with infanticide, even if they wouldn't admit it openly.

 

[ToddNotTodd]

That is speculation unless you believe in science fiction animation.

Hypotheticals are always speculations. What's your answer to the hypothetical?

Plus there is not 'higher brain function' until the child is roughly 24-36 months old.. That would be after birth.

No... This is what I'm talking about.

"Functional maturity of the cerebral cortex is suggested by fetal and neonatal electroencephalographic patterns...First, intermittent electroencephalograpic bursts in both cerebral hemispheres are first seen at 20 weeks gestation; they become sustained at 22 weeks and bilaterally synchronous at 26 to 27 weeks."

K.J.S. Anand, NEJM

The above is the bare minimum conditions in which we should call anything a "person". Before that, there's nothing going on in the brain to warrant such a designation.

Your subjective 'consciousness' theory fails as there can be thousands of opinions of what makes 'us.'

Name one that makes logical sense other than what happens in our brains.

Science clearly shows us that our classification of 'human being' begins at conception.

"Human being" is a term used as a (extremely predicable and tiring) smoke screen by anti abortionists. Fetal tissue is human. There's no argument against that. And it's not relevant. My arm is human tissue. It's not a person by itself if removed. It can only be part of an existent person. If you remove the brain, however, it would be ludicrous to call the rest of the body a person.

 

[redleghunter]

I wonder if there are, in fact, many people who don't have much of a problem with infanticide, even if they wouldn't admit it openly.

Well wonder not. I keep asking these questions about 'mental capacity', 'mental development' and 'developed consciousness' for a reason. Why? Because Peter Singer advocates infanticide based on the same rationalizations given by some posters here.

Peter Albert David Singer, AC (born 6 July 1946) is an Australian moral philosopher. He is the Ira W. DeCamp Professor of Bioethics at Princeton University, and a Laureate Professor at the Centre for Applied Philosophy and Public Ethics at the University of Melbourne. He specializes in applied ethics and approaches ethical issues from a secular, utilitarian perspective. He is known in particular for his book, Animal Liberation (1975), a canonical text in animal rights/liberation theory. For most of his career, he supported preference utilitarianism, but in his later years became a classical or hedonistic utilitarian, when co-authoring The Point of View of the Universe with Katarzyna de Lazari-Radek. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_Singer)

In 1993, ethicist Peter Singer shocked many Americans by suggesting that no newborn should be considered a person until 30 days after birth and that the attending physician should kill some disabled babies on the spot. Five years later, his appointment as Decamp Professor of Bio-Ethics at Princeton University ignited a firestorm of controversy, though his ideas about abortion and infanticide were hardly new. In 1979 he wrote, “Human babies are not born self-aware, or capable of grasping that they exist over time. They are not persons”; therefore, “the life of a newborn is of less value than the life of a pig, a dog, or a chimpanzee.”1 (1 Peter Singer, Practical Ethics, 1st ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979), 122–23.)

Peter Singer is not alone in these beliefs. As early as 1972, philosopher Michael Tooley bluntly declared that a human being “possess[es] a serious right to life only if it possesses the concept of a self as a continuing subject of experiences and other mental states, and believes that it is itself such a continuing entity.”2 Infants do not qualify. (2 Michael Tooley, “Abortion and Infanticide,” in Rights and Wrongs of Abortion, ed. Marshall Cohen, Thomas Nagel, and Thomas Scanlon (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1974), 57.)

More recently, American University philosophy professor Jeffrey Reiman has asserted that unlike mature human beings, infants do not “possess in their own right a property that makes it wrong to kill them.” He explicitly holds that infants are not persons with a right to life and that “there will be permissible exceptions to the rule against killing infants that will not apply to the rule against killing adults and children.”3 (3 Jeffrey Reiman, Critical Moral Liberalism (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 1997), 121.)

http://www.equip.org/article/peter-singers-bold-defense-of-infanticide/

So you can see that starting in the 70s university professors and authors have been indoctrinating young minds with their subjective views of 'personhood' and what constitutes 'consciousness.' So no wonder or surprise should be there. What we are witnessing on these threads is a mimicking of leftist secular atheist assertions of 'personhood' from the 70s at least in US academia but stretching back to the 19th century eugenics movement.

This sound familiar? I've seen it here a few times:

“When we kill a newborn, there is no person whose life has begun. When I think of myself as the person I am now, I realize that I did not come into existence until sometime after my birth.”17 (17 H. Kuhse and Peter Singer, Should the Baby Live? (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985), 133.)

But where do such subjective beliefs based on the particulars come from? Meaning what gives 'life' to such a worldview as Singer's?

“When we reject belief in a god,” he writes, “we must give up the idea that life on this planet has some preordained meaning. Life as a whole has no meaning. Life began [in] a chance combination of molecules; it then evolved through chance mutations and natural selection. All this just happened; it did not happen for any overall purpose.”24 (24 Practical Ethics, 331.)

Theologian JP Moreland addresses Singer's worldview with the following:

Using an illustration taken from J. P. Moreland and Scott B. Rae, consider a man entering a room.22 He can enter it gradually, be in halfway, and then enter it fully. During all stages of entering, the man must first exist in total to do the entering. Likewise, someone cannot be in the process of becoming a human person, since one must first exist in order to enter any process; nor can we say that the fetus becomes a person as it develops, since he or she must first exist in order to do the developing.

One’s past ability to function is, likewise, not decisive. Drawing another illustration from Moreland and Rae, imagine the case of newborn twins named Bill and Bob, both born unconscious.23 Five weeks after birth, Bill briefly attains self-awareness, but then lapses back into a coma from which he will emerge nine months later. Bob, meanwhile, did not experience a similar self-awareness, though he too will emerge from the coma at the same moment as Bill. Suppose it is one day before both will wake up. Would anyone in his right mind say it is morally permissible to kill Bob but not Bill? The only difference between the two is functional: Bill briefly attained self-awareness in the past; Bob did not. It doesn’t follow from this, however, that they have different natures or that Bill is a person while Bob is not.

To sum up, we function as persons because we are persons. Scott Klusendorf the fetus is identical to Scott Klusendorf the adult pro-life apologist because I have a human nature that grounds my personal identity in something that is not developmental. If not, then I am literally a different person than I was 20 minutes ago. Likewise, a fetus that lacks current functional ability is, nonetheless, a person because he or she has a human nature from the moment of existence. (22 J. P. Moreland and Scott B. Rae, Body and Soul: Human Nature and the Crisis of Ethics (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 2000), 253.)

http://www.equip.org/article/peter-singers-bold-defense-of-infanticide/

More background here:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_Singer

https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Peter_Singer

Another article worth reading:

https://erlc.com/article/eleventh-week-eugenics-on-killing-children-with-down-syndrome