So...perception is reality? Is that the argument you're making? Do you have children?My view is that human consciousness, a personality, starts to develop sometime after birth. In the womb, there is nothing to really perceive, so even assuming that a fetus's brain were capable of forming a consciousness, it can't do so because there is nothing to perceive, no perceptions (nothing) to think about, and no need to think about anything.
However, for societal purposes we need to have clear, well-defined laws. The logical place to draw the line is thus at birth. At this point the baby is now individuated and no longer living inside of the mother and we know that it doesn't yet possess a human consciousness. It makes sense to use it as a dividing line for legal purposes. Also, since it's impossible to determine when an infant starts to have a human consciousness, it's a safe place to draw the line and we don't have to deal with two month-long court hearings to make that sort of decision.
Tell me all the problems with making abortion illegal and I'll tell you how unfortunate those problems are and we can feel badly about it. And then I'll tell you that it's just not an argument for legal abortion. Since it's your logic I'm using...I imagine that would make perfect sense to you.What you described is unfortunate and we can feel badly about it. It's just not an argument against legal abortion.
Yes...I see....just an unfortunate actuality of little consequence.Today, yes. At the time of the abortion, no.
Well technically I guess that is true. But the development of a fetus is risky, sort of like childbirth and childhood was before modern medicine. Would you say that families "killed" 50% of their children back in the middle ages when the infant mortality rate was that high? Again I guess you could technically make that claim but we are just playing semantics here. And besides, the fact that the "fetus mortality rate" is high is immaterial to the question of whether it is justified to intentionally end that life.
Using your logic, if we were living 500 years ago when the child mortality rate for children under 10 was substantial, you are saying that this fact would therefore make murder of children under 10 acceptable since they had a relatively high chance of dying anyway?
You're correct in that we don't "have a right to be conceived", the notion of which is nonsensical. How could a life which has not been created yet have a right to ensure its own creation? However once we are conceived, we are a separate being which should have the same right to exist as any other.
I'm not saying you can murder a 10 year old, I'm saying logically following your beliefs how can you morally justify having the child in the first place when you know it's life hangs by a coin toss.
Also you said that after conception you are now a separate being. What do you mean by this?
Are you saying 1 fetilized embryo = 1 baby?. Or are you saying it's separate from it's mother?
Actually, many states have jailed women for using drugs/drinking while pregnant, the charge usually being one of child abuse. Odd that you can kill a fetus, but you can't damage the heck out of it.
I think it can be answered definitively, but I'm an atheist and I believe that reality is objective in nature and that no God-beings exist.
Disclaimer 1: Even if I had a good argument for it, I would never kill anyone for acting legally, abortion doctors included.
Disclaimer 2: I don't want this to morph into yet another debate about abortion in general, so please keep trolling and personal attacks to yourself, regardless of what side you're on.
Question: Are abortion doctors innocent?
I've always struggled with this issue.
I equate abortion to an advanced stage of slavery. Slavery took only liberty necessarily, whereas abortion goes beyond even that, and takes life. It is the wholesale denial of the most basic civil right to an entire class of people, based on factors (such as race and age) entirely beyond their control. And that's the nicest thing I can say about it. It has killed millions. That's a fact. If abortion is murder, then we are casually allowing the slaughter of millions of not just humans, but babies for christ's sake.
If abortion is such a horror, then it follows that we must go to extreme measures to stop it. How extreme? A war was fought to end slavery. Are we willing to use violence, even killing others, to secure the right to life? Can it be secured peaceably? How many kids will die by then?
My dad, who ran an adoption agency for awhile, asked this question of his priest (namely if God wanted him to bomb abortion clinics). The priest said that he had seen war (I think he was a Korea vet), and that even abortion didn't justify murdering doctors. If violence isn't the answer to the killing of children, then to what can violence ever conceivably be the answer? Catholics and Christians aren't pacifists.
I asked Peter Kreeft a similar question in an email. He simply responded that he had no disagreements to what I said. He agreed that abortion was an abomination, but that killing abortion doctors was murderous.
The issue, I think, cruxes on whether or not abortion doctors are innocent. If they are, killing them is murder.
My answer is I don't know, and therefore I can not responsibly act. In the eyes of the law they are innocent. In the eyes of God, I don't know. There are passages in the bible that say to respect the human rules of law, because it is divinely granted.
We live in the freest, most benevolent and humane world power ever to exist. I cannot expect perfection. But how humane is a nation that allows the killing of the most disadvantaged of its citizens?
From a moral perspective its irrelevant as it pertains to an actual abortion whether a person is atheist or believe in God. Its just natural human instinct that finds having an abortion affects most on some degree that this isn't right. I think its just normal human compassion to want to protect life. But abortion is legal and sometimes necessary to preserve the life of the mother. So killing a person who perfroms this medical procedure is wrong plain and simple.
Whether a person is innocent on some spiritual level no matter how we believe can't answered till after death. We know he is well within legal grounds, but from a spiritual perspective only after he leaves this world will he judged if God exists.
In nine months, do proto-viruses become infants? Do they look like fetuses on sonograms?
Basically you do sympathize with the murder of abortion doctors.. Why not just admit it? If you really believe something is murder, I don't see how you can say you don't support the arrest or murder of people who do that "something".
Absolutism however, is exactly what the anti-abortionist movement is all about... There, there are no shades of grey, just black or white. You can't "murder babies", period.Ergo the colossal danger of linear absolutism
If you want my answer as a Catholic, I'd say that God's choices are beyond our ability to comprehend.
I have no problem whatsoever with controlling our instincts, but killing our own progeny is a bit of a stretch. Just because there's too many hats doesn't mean you start lopping off heads.
No they don't - the DNA patterns are very different!
So...perception is reality? Is that the argument you're making? Do you have children?
Tell all the problems with making abortion illegal and I'll tell you how unfortunate those problems are and we can feel badly about it. And then I'll tell you that it's just not an argument for legal abortion. Since it's your logic...I imagine that would make perfect sense to you.
Even if you believe abortion is "murder," then the doctor is just a "hitman," the person initiating the "murder" and ordering the hit is the woman. So targeting the doctor and not the customers is a bit unfair, even if you think it's "murder."
Absolutism however, is exactly what the anti-abortionist movement is all about... There, there are no shades of grey, just black or white. You can't "murder babies", period.
The mother's situation or the events surrounding the conception of the foetus is never a consideration, never a factor in the equation. That's taking an absolute stance, if anything is.
Worse yet, most of the (typically christian, conservative - oxymoron in itself, as Jesus was what's comparable now to a revolutionary marxist, olol) anti-abortionists can't be bothered to give a shit sideways about the baby once it's actually been born.
As long as it's still in the mother's womb, they'll yell and scream and bible-thump up and down the streets, but once born and the mother can't support it or take care of it properly, it just becomes a liability to society, a burden on those nice upstanding christians' tax payments.
And who wants to pay taxes, amiright or amiright!!
If one uses the Bible as a guide, perhaps one should first find where in the Bible does it say Abortion is Murder.
Protip: It doesn't.
So a particular form of murder is okay, because it is not specified as murder in an ancient text. :hmm:
I'm not sure which issue gives conservatives more of a black eye, this or gay marriage.