Should trying to conceive a child be made illegal if personhood starts at conception?

[ranunculus]

Regardless of what you believe, it is. You are calling natural, unpreventable deaths "genocide". You have not once acknowledged that preventing conception also prevents birth. You are a troll.

They are preventable, don't get pregnant.

Of course preventing conception also prevents birth. Why is that a problem?

 

[Mary Meg]

I guess I have my answer.

You mean the human race dying off, why is it unacceptable? (I'm not saying it isn't, I'm asking why you think it is)

Because I'm not a nihilist. Because human life and society are good and bring many goods to the world. Because I love life and people and want them to go on living. Because God is still on the throne and still has a purpose for these feeble beings called humans.

 

[Mary Meg]

They are preventable, don't get pregnant.

Of course preventing conception also prevents birth. Why is that a problem?

I am through with you, troll. I ignored the other guy and now I'm ignoring you. If you argue in good faith, I'm glad to talk to you. If you egg on and insult my intelligence and values and generally be hurtful, I'm not going to continue with this.

 

[blackribbon]

They are preventable, don't get pregnant.

Of course preventing conception also prevents birth. Why is that a problem?

Pregnancy is only preventable with abstinence or sterilization. You never did state which was in your grand scheme to save all the miscarriages the horrors of dying before birth. .

 

[ranunculus]

Why is the difference between accidental death and intentional murder so hard for you to understand? The difference is there is no human intervention intending to kill the baby in a miscarriage and an intentional abortion is the act of killing a baby that was completely capable of living past birth. .

The difference is very clear to me. But you can stop the accidental deaths by not getting pregnant. Of course it's only a problem if you regard the unborn as persons like you or me.

 

[blackribbon]

The difference is very clear to me. But you can stop the accidental deaths by not getting pregnant. Of course it's only a problem if you regard the unborn as persons like you or me.

You can only stop conception by stopping sexual activity or sterilization. And yet, every month another potential life will be wasted regardless even if it wasn't ever to be a human person. Until there are no more lives to worry about...or argue ridiculous theories believing that there is something deep or unique about the concept.

 

[blackribbon]

The difference is very clear to me. But you can stop the accidental deaths by not getting pregnant. Of course it's only a problem if you regard the unborn as persons like you or me.

It isn't a problem to those of us who know life begins when it is complete. And just as it starts, it will have an end. Where that end is doesn't make it less sacred or natural.... or murder, less horrific.

 

[ranunculus]

I am through with you, troll. I ignored the other guy and now I'm ignoring you. If you argue in good faith, I'm glad to talk to you. If you egg on and insult my intelligence and values and generally be hurtful, I'm not going to continue with this.

You shouldn't call people names like jerk or troll just because we have differences of opinion.

I think I understand your viewpoint because I largely agree, having millions of embryos die in the womb is a natural and acceptable outcome of the process of getting pregnant. Without pregnancies the human race would soon go extinct. But that's because I don't regard the unborn as human persons with the same rights as you or me. If I did, I would have a problem it.

Thank you for your time.

 

[blackribbon]

You shouldn't call people names like jerk or troll just because we have differences of opinion.

I think I understand your viewpoint because I largely agree, having millions of embryos die in the womb is a natural and acceptable outcome of the process of getting pregnant. Without pregnancies the human race would soon go extinct. But that's because I don't regard the unborn as human persons with the same rights as you or me. If I did, I would have a problem it.

Thank you for your time.

Again, if you don't believe the unborn are persons, you have to have an idea of when you believe they suddenly become people....

or is there a stage when they are 1/4 persons....then 1/2 persons...and then 3/4 person...only to eventually become full persons?

 

[ranunculus]

It isn't a problem to those of us who know life begins when it is complete. And just as it starts, it will have an end. Where that end is doesn't make it less sacred or natural.... or murder, less horrific.

I don't know what you mean by that.

I agree with Mary Meg's line of argument.
Becoming pregnant is a human right and the risk of that action is an acceptable and natural outcome of the process. But again, I feel that way because I don't agree that a fetus is a person. If I did think a fetus was a person, shouldn't I be apprehensive about allowing so many people to die?

 

[ranunculus]

Again, if you don't believe the unborn are persons, you have to have an idea of when you believe they suddenly become people....

or is there a stage when they are 1/4 persons....then 1/2 persons...and then 3/4 person...only to eventually become full persons?

Here's where we disagree. They don't suddenly become people. There is no hard line. When does a person become old? When does a young person become an adult? There is no answer. It's a gradual process and I don't think you can easily quantify it.

 

[InterestedAtheist]

I think the point this thread makes is a good one. Do people really believe that a fertilised egg is a person? Because they sure don't act like it.
If a fertilised egg is a person, then every miscarriage is the death of a child. In other situations where huge numbers of children were dying naturally, we would be spending huge amounts of time, money and effort on finding ways to prevent these deaths. But we don't. Why not? Is it because we don't really, in our heart of hearts, believe that they really are children?

This reminds me of an article which made this same point. Written by a pro-choice Christian Evangelical in 2018, it says:
Here is a story from the Cleveland Plain Dealer last week. It was a sad story for hundreds of Ohio families: “University Hospitals notifies 700 fertility patients of freezer ‘fluctuation’ and potential damage to stored eggs and embryos.”

University Hospitals has notified about 700 fertility patients and their families that the frozen eggs and embryos they had stored at one of its hospitals may have been damaged over the weekend when the temperature rose in a storage tank.

The problem, in one of two large freezers preserving specimens at the UH Fertility Center housed at the Ahuja Medical Center in Beachwood, was discovered on Sunday morning. It occurred some time after staff left the previous afternoon, according to Patti DePompei, president of UH Rainbow Babies & Children’s Hospital and MacDonald Women’s Hospital.

The liquid nitrogen freezer held about 2,000 egg and embryo specimens, according to Dr. James Liu, chairman of the department of Obstetrics and Gynecology at UH Cleveland Medical Center.
...
That’s sad news. It is right and appropriate and accurate to feel sad — sad for those families and their lost hope.

But when you read this story you do not feel sad about the death of those frozen embryos. No one does.

You may think that you’re supposed to feel such sadness — that you’re supposed to be staggered by the immense tragedy of hundreds of human persons whose lives were snuffed out in a single blow. You may have been taught that this is what you’re required and expected to feel. You may have been taught this relentlessly, through years of rote repetition and insistent, uncompromising indoctrination. You may have been told that this is a matter of fundamental ethics or religion, and that it would be monstrously immoral of you not to feel massive, heart-wrenching anguish over the death of all these people — all these innocent babies.

You may have been taught that the sheer numbers involved here should make you 10 or 20 times more heartbroken over this freezer malfunction than you were over the shocking deaths of all those children in Sandy Hook.

But you do not feel that.

No one does. No one can. No one should.

Because that isn’t true. You already know that. Everybody already knows that — even the people desperately insisting otherwise.

That’s why those people don’t picket outside of fertility clinics, or demand legislation or constitutional amendments to ban them entirely. Because they know, even if they will never admit it, or never allow themselves to articulate the admission of it, that the human embryos lost last week at University Hospital were not yet human persons. They were potential human persons, but — despite all that sloganeering and indoctrination — everyone knows that’s not the same thing as actual human persons.
...
These frozen embryos were potential human persons. That gives them significant moral value, but not the same moral value as that of actual human persons. The loss of hundreds of frozen embryos is sad because it means lost hope, lost potential future, for hundreds of families. But it is not anything at all the same as if hundreds of actual human persons had died in a single tragedy.

We all know this. We all recognize this.

That’s why we didn’t have a national moment of silence in commemoration of the lives lost at University Hospital.

That’s why Gov. Kasich didn’t order Ohio flags to be flown at half-staff in honor of these victims the way he did last month for two police officers slain in Westerville. That’s why anyone who seriously attempted to argue in public that the loss of these hundreds of human embryos was a greater tragedy than the death of those two officers would be rightly viewed as morally confused and contemptuously disrespectful toward those officers and their families.

 

[grasping the after wind]

I'm just exposing the inconsistencies of the pro life rhetoric. Millions of children die in the womb and no one bats an eye.

The only thing you are you are exposing is your ignorance of the actual anti abortion argument. The argument is not that no one should be allowed to engage in any activity that might end up with someone dying, it is that no one should have the right to actively kill another person. Your rebuttal is a rebuttal to a strawman. There are reasonable rebuttals to the anti abortion argument but a strawman isn't included in them. If you are going to allow for the personhood of the fetus, you will not find very few good arguments to support abortion. That is why most pro abortion arguments do not accept the personhood of the fetus. As has been pointed out by others here, every living human either has or will die at some point so your argument, to be taken seriously, would have to include all deaths not just death through miscarriage.If that is the case, then the gist of your argument is that people should not be allowed to procreate because of the reality of death in some form or other. Active killing and naturally occurring death are considered equivalent in your argument, yet I know of no one that believes that to be the case. To take the the logic of your proposal to its ultimate conclusion, one would have to say that since I will die at the age of 97 due to congestive heart failure my parents ought not to have been allowed to procreate in the first place and humanity ought to cease to exist entirely after the current generation
as continuing to procreate will only end up in he eventual death of every human born.

 

[blackribbon]

Here's where we disagree. They don't suddenly become people. There is no hard line. When does a person become old? When does a young person become an adult? There is no answer. It's a gradual process and I don't think you can easily quantify it.

Well it needs to be quantified....can you kill a newborn, an infant, a toddler? Does taking a breath make it human ... or having a heart beat ... or moving? And if there is a start to personhood, where does it end? When a person can no longer breath, their heart stops beating? When brain activity stops?....Is a micropreemie a person? What about a preemie? .. What defines a human with personhood?

If it is a gradual process as you say, is a 30 week preemie 3/4ths of a person and a 20 week fetus a 1/2 of a person? and at what age does Grandma become 3/4ths of a person too?

 

[InterestedAtheist]

You may have been taught that the sheer numbers involved here should make you 10 or 20 times more heartbroken over this freezer malfunction than you were over the shocking deaths of all those children in Sandy Hook.
But you do not feel that.
No one does. No one can. No one should.
Because that isn’t true. You already know that. Everybody already knows that — even the people desperately insisting otherwise.

If I were to hear of an explosion at a factory, killing hundreds of people, or at a school, killing hundreds of children, or at a kindergarten, killing hundreds of toddlers, I would feel appalled, as we all would.
But in this case?

 

[InterestedAtheist]

The only thing you are you are exposing is your ignorance of the actual anti abortion argument. The argument is not that no one should be allowed to engage in any activity that might end up with someone dying, it is that no one should have the right to actively kill another person. Your rebuttal is a rebuttal to a strawman. There are reasonable rebuttals to the anti abortion argument but a strawman isn't included in them. If you are going to allow for the personhood of the fetus, you will not find very few good arguments to support abortion. That is why most pro abortion arguments do not accept the personhood of the fetus. As has been pointed out by others here, every living human either has or will die at some point so your argument, to be taken seriously, would have to include all deaths not just death through miscarriage.If that is the case, then the gist of your argument is that people should not be allowed to procreate because of the reality of death in some form or other. Active killing and naturally occurring death are considered equivalent in your argument, yet I know of no one that believes that to be the case. To take the the logic of your proposal to its ultimate conclusion, one would have to say that since I will die at the age of 97 due to congestive heart failure my parents ought not to have been allowed to procreate in the first place and humanity ought to cease to exist entirely after the current generation
as continuing to procreate will only end up in he eventual death of every human born.

If all of the doctors around the world were to suddenly brush off their hands and say, "Well, enough with childhood cancer. No need to research it any more. Why try to stop something natural?" would you feel they were right? Or would you say that it is very important indeed that we research childhood cancer and try to find ways to save as many children as possible from it?

Well, in a very real sense, that's what people have said about miscarriages. Are there any urgent-large-scale, well-funded investigations into how to stop miscarriages from taking place? By the scale of deaths caused by miscarriages, this is a public health crisis. Wouldn't you say?

 

[blackribbon]

I think the point this thread makes is a good one. Do people really believe that a fertilised egg is a person? Because they sure don't act like it.
If a fertilised egg is a person, then every miscarriage is the death of a child. In other situations where huge numbers of children were dying naturally, we would be spending huge amounts of time, money and effort on finding ways to prevent these deaths. But we don't. Why not? Is it because we don't really, in our heart of hearts, believe that they really are children?

This reminds me of an article which made this same point. Written by a pro-choice Christian Evangelical in 2018, it says:
Here is a story from the Cleveland Plain Dealer last week. It was a sad story for hundreds of Ohio families: “University Hospitals notifies 700 fertility patients of freezer ‘fluctuation’ and potential damage to stored eggs and embryos.”

University Hospitals has notified about 700 fertility patients and their families that the frozen eggs and embryos they had stored at one of its hospitals may have been damaged over the weekend when the temperature rose in a storage tank.

The problem, in one of two large freezers preserving specimens at the UH Fertility Center housed at the Ahuja Medical Center in Beachwood, was discovered on Sunday morning. It occurred some time after staff left the previous afternoon, according to Patti DePompei, president of UH Rainbow Babies & Children’s Hospital and MacDonald Women’s Hospital.

The liquid nitrogen freezer held about 2,000 egg and embryo specimens, according to Dr. James Liu, chairman of the department of Obstetrics and Gynecology at UH Cleveland Medical Center.
...
That’s sad news. It is right and appropriate and accurate to feel sad — sad for those families and their lost hope.

But when you read this story you do not feel sad about the death of those frozen embryos. No one does.

You may think that you’re supposed to feel such sadness — that you’re supposed to be staggered by the immense tragedy of hundreds of human persons whose lives were snuffed out in a single blow. You may have been taught that this is what you’re required and expected to feel. You may have been taught this relentlessly, through years of rote repetition and insistent, uncompromising indoctrination. You may have been told that this is a matter of fundamental ethics or religion, and that it would be monstrously immoral of you not to feel massive, heart-wrenching anguish over the death of all these people — all these innocent babies.

You may have been taught that the sheer numbers involved here should make you 10 or 20 times more heartbroken over this freezer malfunction than you were over the shocking deaths of all those children in Sandy Hook.

But you do not feel that.

No one does. No one can. No one should.

Because that isn’t true. You already know that. Everybody already knows that — even the people desperately insisting otherwise.

That’s why those people don’t picket outside of fertility clinics, or demand legislation or constitutional amendments to ban them entirely. Because they know, even if they will never admit it, or never allow themselves to articulate the admission of it, that the human embryos lost last week at University Hospital were not yet human persons. They were potential human persons, but — despite all that sloganeering and indoctrination — everyone knows that’s not the same thing as actual human persons.
...
These frozen embryos were potential human persons. That gives them significant moral value, but not the same moral value as that of actual human persons. The loss of hundreds of frozen embryos is sad because it means lost hope, lost potential future, for hundreds of families. But it is not anything at all the same as if hundreds of actual human persons had died in a single tragedy.

We all know this. We all recognize this.

That’s why we didn’t have a national moment of silence in commemoration of the lives lost at University Hospital.

That’s why Gov. Kasich didn’t order Ohio flags to be flown at half-staff in honor of these victims the way he did last month for two police officers slain in Westerville. That’s why anyone who seriously attempted to argue in public that the loss of these hundreds of human embryos was a greater tragedy than the death of those two officers would be rightly viewed as morally confused and contemptuously disrespectful toward those officers and their families.

You are wrong...because I felt sad and I am somebody. My first thought was the loss of those little babies. Those embryos are a reason I have a problem with artificial fertilization. The longer I work with postpartum and antepartum mothers (and their babies), the more I believe that full personhood is the point of fertilization and each stage after that is just a developmental stage of a person's life.

 

[ranunculus]

Well it needs to be quantified....can you kill a newborn, an infant, a toddler? Does taking a breath make it human ... or having a heart beat ... or moving? And if there is a start to personhood, where does it end? When a person can no longer breath, their heart stops beating? When brain activity stops?....Is a micropreemie a person? What about a preemie? .. What defines a human with personhood?

If it is a gradual process as you say, is a 30 week preemie 3/4ths of a person and a 20 week fetus a 1/2 of a person? and at what age does Grandma become 3/4ths of a person too?

I don't know what the answer is. My best guess is that living breathing humans with brain activity are people. But I'm not married to that idea.
Can I ask, what does the bible say about personhood, when does it start? I've heard it isn't until a baby draws it's first breath.

My goal here is not to straw man your arguments, I'm a believer in steel manning, presenting the opposition's argument in the best possible light. If I did straw man your argument, I apologize. It's honestly not my intention. And maybe I'm jumping to conclusions without sufficiently explaining all the intermediate steps I took to get there. I'm the first to admit I'm not the best at presenting my case in the most logical way possible. There's a gap between the thoughts in my head and the words I write down. I'm trying to bridge that gap but it's not always easy.
The best I can say that this thread, which was too long to post on /r/showerthoughts, was a learning experience.
Thank you for entertaining my ideas and have a pleasant day.

 

[blackribbon]

If all of the doctors around the world were to suddenly brush off their hands and say, "Well, enough with childhood cancer. No need to research it any more. Why try to stop something natural?" would you feel they were right? Or would you say that it is very important indeed that we research childhood cancer and try to find ways to save as many children as possible from it?

Well, in a very real sense, that's what people have said about miscarriages. Are there any urgent-large-scale, well-funded investigations into how to stop miscarriages from taking place? By the scale of deaths caused by miscarriages, this is a public health crisis. Wouldn't you say?

Are you people really so ignorant to the very active education and health care pushes on prenatal care that goes to even before a woman gets pregnant? My kids are over 20 and when I told my doctor I was getting ready to start wanting children, she checked to see if my vaccines titers were high enough (I had to get another dose of MMR). She gave me both prenatal vitamins and folic acid. I was to wait 3 months before trying to get pregnant after that vaccine. My uterus and cervix were looked at. I was put on a health diet (and had to turn in a diet diary to my midwife after I was pregnant). We take vitamins. We stop smoking and drinking. We question every pill (even prescribed) that goes in our mouths. Many give up caffeine. We stop using hot tubs. We go in on a regular basis so that a stranger can put his hand inside our body to monitor the safe environment of our fetuses. We pee in cups monthly. What do you mean that society doesn't value or actively try to protect even a fetus?

 

[blackribbon]

I don't know what the answer is. My best guess is that living breathing humans with brain activity are people. But I'm not married to that idea.
Can I ask, what does the bible say about personhood, when does it start? I've heard it isn't until a baby draws it's first breath.

My goal here is not to straw man your arguments, I'm a believer in steel manning, presenting the opposition's argument in the best possible light. If I did straw man your argument, I apologize. It's honestly not my intention. And maybe I'm jumping to conclusions without sufficiently explaining all the intermediate steps I took to get there. I'm the first to admit I'm not the best at presenting my case in the most logical way possible. There's a gap between the thoughts in my head and the words I write down. I'm trying to bridge that gap but it's not always easy.
The best I can say that this thread, which was too long to post on /r/showerthoughts, was a learning experience.
Thank you for entertaining my ideas and have a pleasant day.

Jeremiah 1:5
“Before I formed you in the womb I knew you,
and before you were born I consecrated you;
I appointed you a prophet to the nations.”

Galatians 1:15
15 But when he who had set me apart before I was born, and who called me by his grace

There will be a day when today's "nonviable" babies will be living, growing and developing in NICUs. I have never met a NICU baby that wasn't a person. And I have never considered a person on a ventilator to have stopped being a person. Since the neurological system is developed first, I believe and medical death is defined by lack of brain waves...brainwaves as the definition of personhood would closely resemble mine definition.