Originally posted by Blackhawk
I think the real point Seebs is that no one has the right to take another innocent human beings life. Captial punishment (whether right or wrong) is different because the person is not innocent. In abortion the child has done nothing except be in the wrong place at the wrong time.
Ahh, but see, I'm not sure of the universality of that rule. Capital punishment often affects innocent people. Are we allowed to take a 5% risk of killing an innocent person? 10%? 30%?
"Alive" is not an either-or thing for humans. A person who is brain-dead but has a heartbeat... Is this person "a human life"? I don't know. How about comas? How about someone who's been in a coma for 8 years?
In practice, we are obliged to guess, approximate, and do our best. Confronted with a pregnant woman who has been injured probably-fatally, the "best" option may be to do a C-section, hoping to save the baby, even though you are almost certainly killing the mother in the process. Or maybe it isn't.
I think that the same questionable status that applies to people who are brain-dead applies to an embryo. At Day 1 of a pregnancy, with the best possible medical care, the chance of getting a living baby is nowhere *near* 100%; I seem to recall that about a third of pregnancies spontaneously abort; the exact number is hard to get, because if the pregnancy spontaneously aborts on Day 2, you may never know the mother was pregnant.
How about ectopic pregnancies? No known way to get a baby out of it - but if you don't terminate it, the mother is very likely to die a horrible death. The only way she won't is if it spontaneously aborts.
My personal guess is that the cut-off for "personhood" is around the point at which there are brain waves. However, that's a personal opinion.
I think that aborting even on Day 1 of a pregnancy is ending a *potential* person, but I don't think a *person* was killed, just a potential person... This is still something to be avoided, IMHO. By 8-9 months, I think we're talking about a "person", probably. But I still don't know.
I guess, what frustrates me here is that this *IS* a very unusual case. There is no other moral or ethical case to compare with which has the same qualities. The Bible does address this, partially - we can compare the penalty for killing a person to the penalty for causing a pregnancy to abort. They're handled differently.
If the Bible says "the penalty for killing a baby is X, and the penalty for ending a pregnancy is Y", we can derive from these some rules about the relative severities of the actions.
Furthermore, I seem to recall that there's stillborn babies in the Bible. Are they mourned the same way dead children are mourned? If not, this once again argues for a different standard.
I think the Biblical standard is pretty close to the "extreme" pro-choice position: If it isn't born yet, it's not a "person". I suspect this may be partially an error rooted in lack of understanding; keep in mind, the people involved thought the "seed" had all the person-bits, and the mother only provided a place for the "seed" to grow.
So... I think it's probably generally a bad idea to abort a fetus, but before there's brain waves, I don't think it's "murder", and even after that, I'm not sure it ought to count the same as killing a "full person". The additional complications due to the baby's dependancy on a specific person make it much harder to answer this; in no other case of alleged "murder" are we dealing with a conflict between the rights of two people.
I also think it's quite clear that non-elective abortions (ectopic pregnancies and the like) should not be worried about - but this makes it even harder for me to call it "murder" to electively end a pregnancy at the same stage.
In the end, most of human morality is emotional response; this has been demonstrated at length by researchers. If you phrase a moral quandry differently, but the actual facts are identical, peoples' answers change dramatically; the "reasoning" part of the process only comes in when you ask them to justify their answers.
With all of this... It's complicated enough that I do not feel human wisdom is sufficient to judge it, and as a result, I would rather each person face it on their own, with guidance, than have a firm policy. I believe that individuals are wiser than groups.