The moderate pro-life crowd should see this behavior as scummy and denounce it, as it taints their cause. IE take the high road to attaining their goals. Those in support of this behavior, have more deep ethical challenges, and I sincerely hope and believe are not the majority of pro-life voters..
(Using “pro-life” reluctantly here, to avoid distractions)
Edit to add: my intent by this comment is to depolarize. It’s frustrating to see child comments from the pro-choice side that don’t take my hint :/ Let’s not engage with the extreme on either side folks, if we want to better understand the opposing points of view. Yes, the loudest voices are often the most extreme, and no the moderates don’t denounce (on both sides!), but we can try to do better on our beloved HN.
Why? To someone who thinks abortion is the murder of babies, what you advocate is priority inversion error. Your idea is a lot like saying the police in Uvalde shouldn't have gone in and (eventually) shot the school shooter, rather they should have "take[n] the high road to attaining their goals" and just talked to him until he stopped of his own accord.
If your government/heathcare/someOtherOrg was grinding up babies post birth at scale, or any equivalent, I'd expect the response to be more riots and bombs, and less "Let's campaign for fifty odd years to get the capability to ban it in a number of states".
Edit: Response to "of course they do": I strongly disbelieve that, simply because of their response
There were ~600k abortions in 2021. If the right truly believed in their hearts that an abortion is directly equal to a murder, they'd basically be giving a pathetic response to what would be an absolutely "Final Solution" level crime. Estimates of the Jewish death toll were ~6 million and was responded to by full fledged, hot war. If their response to a holocaust every 10 years was "we'll slowly eke forward over 50Y, and manage to get bans in just half the country", that's a hell of a pathetic response.
Why would you think that? Clearly almost everyone that is against abortion believes that, that's the whole point.
Even most people who are in favour of abortion would consider it at least close to murder if say an abusive husband beats his pregnant wife, killing the baby.
The only difference there is that the mother wanted the child to live, how can that have bearing on whether it's murder or not?
It's not as clear as you seem to think.
I would agree with the second court here. Prior to 25weeks this shouldn't be a murder. But if the action have an effect on the woman ability to bear children in the future, this should be considered as aggravating circumstances.
And there is no case of abusing husbands causing miscarriage in the US. Even though i found study citing that 27% of miscarriage are caused by wife beaters in india, i couldn't find the statistics or any case in the US.
> Except that (virtually) nobody on the right truly believes that it's full fledged baby murder. They believe it's bad, but clearly, from their response, it's not anywhere near as bad as that.
So? That doesn't affect my point at all. They don't have to think abortion is "full fledged baby murder" for what was advocated up-thread to be a priority inversion error. They just have to think of it as being more wrong than whatever persuasion tactics the "counseling clinics" use. Given that all but the most extreme persuasion tactics themselves typically rate from "not wrong" to "mildly wrong/annoying," that's not a hard bar to pass.
Unfortunately that's a very common misconception, but is completely false. Nobody went to war for the Jews. Nobody fought, or did anything of note really, to save them. Hell, countries, including the almighty USA, refused refugee ships with Jews, even after the war started and concentration (but not extermination) camps were well known.
Just read Szmul Zygielbojm's suicide letter on the matter.
Private citizens conspiring to trick other private citizens, is not in the same ballpark or league.
Once the baby is born, the people who forced that baby to be born no longer care about them. They are no longer a political pawn. In fact, they will continue to attack the social safety nets and programs that they could end up relying on to survive. Safe sex education so that this child doesn't have a baby? NO! That goes against the Bible.
This is advantageous sometimes to the Christian nationalist cause, as they may be adopted by large fundamentalist families or lured towards religious charities that ARE subsidized through the state. Sounds crazy, but you should hear how some of these extremists talk. It's borderline child trafficking.
It's funny you mention cutting up your insides. That's propaganda. Most abortions are done with pills, up to more than 12 months. What happens? It comes out as a heavy flow. That's it. Most people don't wait until they have an noticeable baby-bump to have an abortion. Most propaganda about the operation is dishonest, exaggerated, and straight up propaganda.
Another fun fact is that these abortion laws are extremely draconian. Some have no exceptions for rape and/or incest. Meaning that rapists will and have been given parental visitation rights. Children victims can even be forced into this situation, disgusting.
Had a miscarriage? That can now be investigated as a crime. Police can now get your messages, location data, search history, hard drives, and search your house.
This is theocratic insanity, in America. Feels like Iran.
Christians don't always behave this badly in other countries, but in America we've *really* sipped on the GOP/Christian propaganda Koolaid and we look like absolute clowns.
By the same token, wouldn't it be unethical to not have as many kids as possible all the time? After all, those kids will be glad that they were born.
This is obviously not a serious suggestion, just calling into question the right of unborn children to have claims of an adult (or sometimes non-adult) woman.
That said, there are plenty of people that would agree with the idea that we should have as many babies as we can. Utilitarians for example, and many traditional Christians.
I don't think anyone is advocating killing children.
Aborting a fetus, sure, but a fetus isn't a child any more than an acorn is an oak tree.
Are you murdering potato plants when you eat french fries?
Does munching on peanuts make you peanut hitler?
If I have caviar, am I responsible for the murder of thousands of fish?
Peanuts and caviar are the same, or even more silly. Only with potatoes does the question make sense, and clearly the answer is yes, potato plants die when you harvest them. But almost nobody thinks that is an issue, since they are not even sentient.
In that case, you shouldn't have an issue with a fetus being aborted.
Also, that's now how potatoes work. You harvest them after the plant has died. At least for potatoes used for french fries.
No, I'm not saying that at all, I'm saying your analogies are idiotic, since acorns don't correspond to foetuses - almost no acorns end up as trees.
> Also, that's now how potatoes work. You harvest them after the plant has died.
It was your analogy, not mine. If potatoes are only harvested when dead, how could eating them possibly be murder?
Getting back to the actual question, I don't think a baby is more alive or more human because it has left the womb, or because you've cut the umbilical cord.
If someone stabs a pregnant woman in the belly so that her foetus dies, but she survives, would you agree that he has killed her baby, or has he only harmed her?
What's the limit here? 40%? 60% 80%? Why does the number or miscarriages matter at all?
If your curious ~60% of embryos do not make it to a live birth, and that's excluding abortions. Citation: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5443340/
Not saying that at all. Just like last time, we are still just discussing how bad your analogies were.
> If your curious ~60% of embryos do not make it to a live birth,
I'm well aware of this, and although most of this is accounted for very early on, it's still pretty high. And of course in many cases the embryos were not viable.
> Why does the number or miscarriages matter at all?
I haven't discussed this, it was you that brought it up. With acorns, only 1 out of 10000 becomes a tree, so killing an acorn is substantially different from cutting down a tree. Not even taking into account that these are different forms, an acorn is not a small tree.
You speak as if the issue was black and white, clearly it isn't. Even you think that killing an 8 month old foetus, which has a heartbeat, can dream and even recognises its father's voice, is fundamentally different from taking a morning after pill and stopping a 4 cell cluster from turning into a human.
From a religious point of view, it's entirely reasonable to believe that anything after conception is sacred, since it's the beginning of a specific human being, but even progressive atheists realise that an 8 month foetus most definitely is a complete human.
We assume an unborn person would prefer to be born than killed. An unconceived person doesn't exist at all, so there is no moral/ethical issue in not conceiving them.
The exception maybe is biology, but there is still an upper limit to personal resources which one wouldn't want to exhaust due to the impact on their other (if any) children 's quality of life.
A clump of cells doesn't have enough coherence to have a preference. In fact, babies don't have the kind of brain development necessary to comprehend this question, let alone form a preference until years after being born.
Your argument seems to suggest that a comatose person would have the same entitlement to life and an unborn person.
Feelings aren't understanding. Answering "did I want to be born" requires thought processes newborns aren't even capable of.
I suspect it is down to unbridgeable axiomatic differences.
You see a fertilized egg as a human with rights, I see it as a cell with interesting potential, not particularly more deserving of rights than any other cell with potential.
Even if I accepted that a fertilized egg has human rights, I don't understand why those rights outweigh the autonomy of the donor/host. What if I told you that your blood, bone marrow, kidney, or even lung could save another human's life at relatively minimal risk to your survival? (It's true, and I recommend everyone reading this be an organ donor and sign up for bethematch.com) But should the state be allowed to legally compel you to undertake these risks to save another human life?
Judging the stories of pro-life advocates who get abortions while convincing themselves that "their situation is different" my assumption is that there is a basic lack of human empathy. I've found that this squares with the fact that many people oppose benefits and rights for others but then begin to support them when it personally impacts them.
I have met many people who hated their lives for many reasons. What makes you think these children won't?
Some of the reasons include:
- parents didn't want the children
- children grew up poor
- children grew up with disabilities
- children were put up for adoption
- the world is becoming uninhabitable for the children's children
I can't imagine how someone could feel good about birthing a baby without also giving all of the necessary safeties. And that's just looking at the children's perspective. What about the parents'?
Can you imagine having been raped, then being forced to carry an unwanted child to term, and then also being forced to pay child support to the rapist?
Can you imagine wanting a child but then discovering that the child will be stillborn or worse: born with debilitating defects that you aren't capable of dealing with?
If you want children then go have children. If you don't want children... then why should you be forced to?
> my default is that you really shouldn’t be killing your offspring or cutting up your insides unless you are removing something like cancer or shrapnel.
Indeed! Sometimes the baby is literally dying for reasons outside of your control. But without Roe v Wade then we cannot legally abort. A dying fetus can cause sepsis and death to the mother. That's certainly "something like cancer or shrapnel" in my book.
I had a lot of head-burying opinions too until I had a long and deep conversation with a female friend about politics. She had the patience to listen to what I had to say with the knowledge and experience necessary to provide alternate views. I suggest that you ask the women around you what they think. Don't stop at one or two. Really listen to them. Listen to their perspectives and their opinions. Try to put yourself in their shoes.
You will find that their perspectives and opinions differ from yours. You might even find that they enjoy things that you think should be sacred. You're not wrong and neither are they. But what is wrong is to force your morals and opinions onto them.
My point is, any open-minded debate about abortion will always return to this question. As long as pro-abortion people ignore this question, they are talking past the pro-lifers and will never understand us.
Instead, we let them kill themselves off in droves. 1.21 million attempted suicides per year in the US alone.
I understand the pro-life POV quite well, I just have no respect for them when they drop off all support (aside from the occasional church donation) for children once they're outside the womb. I have no respect for those who value the life of a fetus (alive or dead) over that of the woman (miscarriages don't always clear themselves).
And let's not count those who die from a lack of a blood donation, organ transplant, or postmortem organ donations - things a pro-life advocate could do themselves, but "that's totally different".
Have you talked to young people? Stats and meme culture strongly suggest the opposite, and it's for economic reasons and reasons like loss of personal freedoms such as "women's bodily autonomy".
> I can’t imagine anything LESS scummy than helping save the lives of those babies who are now likely very glad they were born
So would it be ethical to rape someone and force them to give birth? Because the babies would be happy to be born and experiencing life? That's the same logic you're using.
A fetus isn't a person. It's not sentient. It doesn't have hopes and dreams. Personally, I feel guiltier eating pork than having an abortion. Because unlike a fetus, pigs are highly intelligent, social and emotional beings.
On the other hand, a woman is a person. She has the right to control her own body and her own life. If she doesn't want children, she should not be forced to have children. Even if she has sex! Yes, I know that's radical, but I believe that women should be able to have as much sex as they want, with whoever they want, even outside of marriage, without being punished with unwanted children.
I know, and I'm sure you know, that's the real issue. Lots of people are uncomfortable with the concept of consequence-free sex. Christianity, the largest religion in the western world, teaches that sex outside of marriage is wrong. That's why so many people who are against abortion "just happen" to be socially conservative. That's why they "just happen" to be against LGBT as well even though that has fuck-all to do with 'saving babies.' That's why they oppose comprehensive sex education and birth control access, even though that's the most obvious way to reduce unplanned pregnancies.
Defining a person as someone with hopes and dreams is nice poetically, but not great legally. Quite a few adults go through life without hope or dreams, but are still people. A one month old child isn't developed enough to have hopes and dreams, but is a person. Stepping away from the metaphor of hopes and dreams, you can start to observe REM movement in utero at 28 weeks. So in a literal sense, it is likely fetuses do dream.
This isn't an easy issue with a clear science driven answer. A clump of four cells isn't a person, but there is a very reasonable case for 39 week old fetus being as much of a person as a 1 day old infant born at 38 weeks.
> A clump of four cells isn't a person, but there is a very reasonable case for 39 week old fetus being as much of a person as a 1 day old infant born at 38 weeks.
But only 1% of abortions in the US happen after 21 weeks [1]. So there's a blanket ban despite 99% of abortions happening before that 28 week cutoff? How does that track?
[1] https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/70/ss/ss7009a1.htm#T10_down
Hard disagree that the abortion issue is primarily about consequence-free sex. You stated the issue in the first line:
> A fetus isn't a person.
Pro-life people vehemently disagree about this, and it's not coming from a place of prudishness. They are outraged because they feel like babies are being killed.
> It's not killing someone. A fetus isn't a person.
Isn't a fetus kind of like a tadpole? Sure, we may quibble that it isn't a person, but it is still a living being on the way to maturity. Killing a tadpole is killing _something_, right?
I guess I'll add to the chorus of people who "just don't understand the other side" in saying that I don't understand either side. Arguing for fertilized embryo rights makes no sense to me. But arguing in favor of abortion and not even mentioning where the line is drawn makes just as little sense. Oft-repeated phrases like "a fetus isn't a person" sound scary to me. It's casual dismissiveness that falls back on pure terminology, and the thing being dismissed might have a brain comparable to that of an infant. Specificity is extremely important here.
If people are going to act like abortion rights are the most obviously ethical thing in the world, I really wish they'd stop using the word fetus. The obvious, strong argument for abortion only applies to abortions before the fetus is morally person-like. Once a fetus is sufficiently person-like, we must at least admit that the moral calculus is complicated, since at that point there's more than one significant outcome for a feeling, thinking thing.
Because it's not really relevant—the laws making it illegal are making it illegal across the board, no matter how early. The only reason for the heartbeat style laws was to make abortions as a whole as difficult as they could be under Roe. But now that's no longer a concern, the bans are across the board.
> The obvious, strong argument for abortion only applies to abortions before the fetus is morally person-like
Late term abortions are rare, and both expensive and unpleasant enough that you don't go through it unless there's a strong medical need.
So it's not discussed much because it's not a big part of what happens.
This doesn't make any sense. Since the recent SCOTUS decision, laws are surely being drafted in many states right now. People may still be discussing, writing, overturning, and re-writing abortion law twenty years from now. Having a coherent moral position on the issue is absolutely relevant.
> But now that's no longer a concern, the bans are across the board.
This is just completely false. There are fifty states, and most of them have now and will continue to have threshold or multi-threshold laws. By my count six states have blanket bans, and the percentage of the population living under those blanket ban laws is extremely small.
And this is exactly what's bugging me. I think there is a vast middle ground of people who believe all these things:
1. Aborting a fetus with a functioning brain is wrong.
2. Forcing women to carry pregnancies to term against their will is wrong.
3. (1) becomes more wrong the further developed the fetus is.
4. (2) becomes more wrong the greater the harm or risk of harm to the mother is.
And these are the people writing most of the laws in most states. They're also the people that drafted the original Roe v. Wade opinion. These people fall on a spectrum between pro-choice and pro-life, because it's a complicated moral question.
> So it's not discussed much because it's not a big part of what happens.
I think these are Internet goggles. I think it's discussed a lot, given how many different laws there are throughout the world and how detailed many of them are in their timelines and conditions. But for some reason on message boards, it's all Christians unsubtly implying that aborting a fertilized embryo is like making somebody who exists not exist anymore, and on the other side people saying "you're so dumb, a fetus isn't a person" as if that completely settles the question. And the same people act like it's equally obvious that's it's a horrific atrocity to kill an infant that only gestated for 24 weeks, just because its using its lungs and its location in space relative to the mother has changed.
Does it make sense if I say that I'm just as appalled by the simplistically-pro-choice disregard for somewhat-cognitively-developed fetuses as I am by the simplistically-pro-life disregard for a mother's burden? Why is it sufficient that late term abortions are just "rare, expensive, and unpleasant"? Aren't they just as wrong as keeping an unwilling mother from aborting a microscopic blastocyst?
Bet money this is the scenario that will play out if such things were to be pushed.
Accountability is kryptonite for pro-abortion people.
You know that less than 1% of abortion cases are because cof these evil acts. Even if there's an intent on having a discussion (you could do a quick search on yt) on the premise of allowing abortions for those cases, pro-abortion people use rape and incest cases to justify the 99% which are not because of that.
TL;DR: abortion enables casual sex, casual sex is bad for society and women specifically, therefore being pro-life is being pro-woman.
A compromising time limit solution for which elective abortions before is permitted and after is forbidden is the only pragmatic solution.
But this is the other extreme endpoint. With "a compromising time limit solution" I meant something like the around 15 weeks common in European Countries.
It seems the issue is always what is being murdered. The more human-like the thing being murdered is, the more outrageous it is. Plan B, not so outrageous because it's just a few cells. 20+ weeks, people are getting outraged. A dog? Pretty human-like, people don't like dogs being murdered.
At 13 weeks, a fetus looks a heck of a lot like a baby: https://www.researchgate.net/figure/Threedimensional-3d-ultr... (3D ultrasound image). And Roe guarantees elective abortions for another 9-10 weeks after that.
> A fetus isn't a person. It's not sentient. It doesn't have hopes and dreams.
Neither does my infant!
> Lots of people are uncomfortable with the concept of consequence-free sex.
Lots of people are uncomfortable with ending human to eliminate the predictable consequences of sex.
Is that the only threshold? You should look at what dog and elephant fetuses look like.
Perhaps you’re thinking of embryonic development?
People happen to be in a bad situation. There are poor people, ill people, robbed people, raped people, etc.
Forcing people that happen to be raped to not to kill is ethical, and not by Christianity, but by virtually by every moral and ethics that exist.
How could it possibly be ethical to rape someone? Your line of reasoning is really out there.
You know, the sad thing is the party whose mantra has been 'my body my choice' for the past 40+ years, completely lost that moral high ground when they started demanding that people get vaccinated against their will - and yes, there were plenty of people talking about forcibly injecting people, even though it never happened, and yes abortion vs vaccines are not the same thing - but its either 'my body my choice' or it's not - the message and meaning was crystal clear, up until 2 years ago.
The were no shortage of pro-forced vaccine people who were saying 'yes, the government can force you to do things to your body against your will' - and now in light of the abortion debate trying to make the 'my body my choice' argument again just rings a bit hollower.
I said it to my spouse the first few days when you had mainstream politicians and talking heads on TV calling for forced covid injections, I said 'this is going to blow up in their face', and, imo, it did, the absoluteness of 'my body my choice' argument, is no longer as clear.
Did this directly cause the SC to revoke RvW, certainly not, but imo, the 'my body my choice' argument has been tainted.
I mean, i do know a odd full-vegan (no harm to even insects, whereas most vegan i know draw the line to living being with fully formed nociceptors) pro-life, and i respect it, at least he isn't hypocritical. He is also very religious, ardently non-violent, and his life choice are based on his faith (that i won't name here).
Mammals are more conscious of themselves than embryos, are aware of and can recognize themselve in a mirror (baby do not recognize themselves until 14 to 24 months btw). They do have fully formed nociceptors, and even when those aren't triggered, are aware of being mutilated, of their brethren being mutilated or killed.
I cannot take seriously a "pro-life" who eat mammal meat. I don't really care what you eat, but at least your diet should follow your "convictions".
Here’s a thought exercise: take whatever you would consider a viable human and rewind to one developed cell earlier. Is that a human? Repeat until you can guarantee it is not a human. How far do you have to go until that is true for all instances of all fetuses? I came to the conclusion that an embryo, which can live and grow outside of a womb is the earliest logical point to consider the organism a human and make subsequent opinions accordingly.
You can throw random things that differentiate one group from another, it doesn't mean that people are not people and you can kill them.
There won't be any middle ground since you already think fetuses are not "human beings" .
Let's not use religion and go with science. Which biologist, scientist, or doctor is willing to acknowledge and let alone prove that a fetus (unborn human per oxford dictionary) is not human? Take in consideration that the whole scientific community has to acknowledge these assumptions after lots of tests, etc...
Even news outlets are broadcasting women who are saying "hookup culture would be decimated" meaning they are using abortions as birth control.
There's no angle (scientific vor otherwise) to defend abortions other than convenience and lack of accountability.
R vs. W literally hands on the vote to states. California, NY, etc... won't change their policies.
how someone can feel not able to raise a child? how about trying to understand why this person feels not able, and what needs to change so that they will feel able?
i don't see anyone working towards a society where people are actually supported to raise their children.
people are promised help, but when the baby is there, no help is actually forthcoming.
to help save lives, we need to work on our society to be helpful and welcoming to the children when they are actually born, and not just feel good about convincing someone to not have an abortion, with complete disregard for what comes afterwards.
Try helping instead of forbidding. And accept some children should not be born due to health, abuse, rape, etc.
As nicely exemplified by your post where you assume everybody should agree with your opinions on the matter
> at least understand even if I disagree
Oh we understand. It's because you can't tolerate other views as yourself (even within Christianism)
The Taliban shares the same tolerance you display against different religious views