Humans have rights independent of their beliefs or actions. We don't torture people just because they have a different notion of property rights (hmm, we do, but, we shouldn't).

The government does. For a test, try to kill yourself some place a police officer can see you.. Or don't pay your taxes (the product of your own work).

I prefer to think of it as my right to life allows me to protect myself, in spite of their right. But perhaps that is semantics.

I agree. I've never heard a single argument for abortion being the only method of birth control.

I don't see anything unethical with using abortion as birth control, though I would consider it kind of stupid - going through surgery and spending that much money (plus likely having to deal with asshole proteters.) When birth control is cheaper and easier.

All so true! People don't seem to understand that the person whose body is being hijacked will of course have more say over how their body is used, and have every right to jettison any intruder as they see fit.

Plenty of children are intruders as well. Not every intruder is grown. An intruder is just something or someone intruding where it is not wanted. "Intruder" simply means "someone/something not wanted/invited".

Oh wow, a pregnancy is punishment for a woman daring to have sex.

I'm the same way with bad arguments against abortion. I try to fight them when I have the chance. You just regurgitated one of the oldest and lamest arguments against. WOW.

I don't see where Ivan said "pregnancy is punishment"... As a man, I don't know what it's like first hand. When my wife was pregnant, it was uncomfortable for her. It limited what she could do at the time, but I don't think she felt punished.

The problem I see with many of these arguments is that no one mentions responsibility. Our actions have consequences. We may not like the consequences, or want to know about them, but they exist. Covering up the consequences should not be our first thought. Killing innocents to cover up the consequences should not be acceptable.

Dude, you are speaking for women. YOU DO NOT KNOW!

Statistics

Oh snap! They don't feel bad. They don't feel shame! They aren't sorry!

I've had two abortions. Sure, there was something new and alive in me. I didn't want it there. I was disgusted by it. I paid someone a lot of money to kill it. It's dead now. YAY! Pregnancy is AWFUL to me. Not everyone shares your view of pregnancy.

Don't mean to nitpick, but it really makes me twitch when people say a fetus is in the belly. It brings about the, "OMG, she ate it!?" response in me.

Rape-Play. It's a form of role-play.

Repost, 'cause Nedbrek seems to have missed my post and I have little reason to believe he'll revisit page 2 and I'd like a reply.

Ownership is absolute irresponsible control. Having control requires consiousness. Governments are imaginary, they're not consious. Therefore, they can't own anything, unless they're a group of consious people, in which case people can own other people.

Please show me how the government came to aquire ownership of me against my will without my consent and not by theft (theft would destroy the government's legitemacy, destroying the concept of government as such and forcing the portrayal of government as a mafia).

A moment of silence for my poor, dead joke

Obviously our notions of government, property, and most everything else are entirely different...

This was an excellent article. Are there any you can link up that have a more scientific basis for life at birth?

As you have introduced practicality as a standard you also invite the following example: A healthy person has ten organs which match the blood type and size of ten ailing people who cannot find any other donors. Those ten ailing people affect the lives of more people than the healthy person; their overall value is greater. Should the healthy person give up her life since it is worth less?

I realize that it may seem like I'm skewing the topic of discussion here; my point is that you bring up this idea  of "practical" without fully explaining it. Practical is a loaded term and so I don't know what meaning you are taking when you discuss it within the context of abortion. Can you explain what you mean by practical further?

the issue of abortion. 

Basing it on the value of what is involved, as in the woman being more valuable than the fetus and also on which is most demanding of an unwilling participant is a good way to make a determination. That does mean that the dependancy here is an issue.

The woman already has some detectable value, she interacts with people, and affects those areound her already. Indeed, the number of individuals that she affects is greater than that of the fetus. Add to this that the woman has a cognitive capacity for suffering, which also adds some value and then her value far outweighs that of the fetus in this perspective. So, no, there isn't an assumption here, there is something we can actually measure and see. 

Context is going to be everything for something like this. Did the individual choose to care for the elderly person or are they obligated to for a specific reason? Also, bear in mind that having the right to do something and if it is moral to do something may not always be the same thing. I may not have the right to grab a loaf of bread off the shelf of a grocery store and walk out - but I would say that the young man and woman that were shown in pictures looting food from stores after hurricane katrina that took the food to people who needed it were not making an immoral decision.

Also, counting who something affects also accounts for the cognitive capacity of the individual themselves. The elderly person's capacity for suffering is certainly a factor in making ethical decisions regarding their future. At the same tim, a fetus' neurological capacity for suffering is likely much, much smaller.

This reminds me of another ethical dilemma that came up in the news during Hurricane Katrina. There was an assisted care facility in which there were a certain number of individuals. After Katrina, the staff of the facility abandoned the elderly people who were there in order to go to another location. Later on the individuals were charged for crimes of neglect due to their decision to leave the elderly. So, the question was asked, did they have the "right" to leave? Was their actions "moral?" In that particular case, they had taken on the obligation of caring for those people and had agreed that it was their responsibility and their actions had led to the death of people in the facility. As such, they had neither the right to leave, nor were their actions moral. So the context of the situation is going to be a main factor in if it is moral or if they have a right to do something of that nature. 

Because in the cases that you mentioned it is about individuals with the neurological capacity for suffering and also in the cases where it would be immoral, the individual would likely be obligated by some other means to care for the individual.

In the oak tree analogy I was valueing it based on the utility of the oak to the individuals that would use it. If I had, for example, a tree on my right and an acorn on my left and wanted to build a fire - then the tree is more valueable. If I wanted a tree for some other reason, the tree that was already there is more valuable. 

 I've already discussed how we can assess the situation to determine what we can look at in order to make these decisions. The value of the fetus is one, its dependancy on the woman, the capacity of suffering is another, as well as who is affected and their capacity of suffering and how they are affected.

I think that given that the capacity for suffering is greater in the woman and that the fetus *is* dependant on the woman against her will, then the most humane stance would be to keep it as her choice throughout the duration of the pregnancy. That doesn't mean that giving the option is pleasant or that suffering won't occur, as it becomes a situation in which neither option is really not inhumane. It becomes a lesser of two evils. I'm sure that if I sat here and considered it I could come up with many cases in which abortion is inhumane, but that doesn't mean that keeping the woman from an abortion is humane. In these situations it is a matterof taking the route of the least inhumane option.

I will say, though, that there is a point where I think more options should be available to women than what there is now. I am not opposed to people allowing for the early delivery of a fetus if a woman no longer wants to be pregnant. Said fetus could be put up for adoption, or the woman can be given other options in order to accomodate such a situation in a more rational manner than simply requiring her to either remain pregnant or kill the fetus. In a way, this is available to women who's lives are in danger already, which is generally the reason for late-term abortions anyway, but for the extremely rare situation in which the life of the woman is not in danger, I think this should be an option and could lead to an even less inhumane option for women to have. 

I'm not sure exactly what you mean - but abortion, technically, is nearly always in self-defense. In the event that it wasn't and the woman wanted an abortion for some other reason - then it should still be her choice, yes. Although, as I sit here and consider it, I am unable to come up with a scenario where it wouldn't be in either self-defense or in defense of the woman who is pregnant, so perhaps you can help with the conjuring of such a scenario so that I can make a better determination.

 It is still self-defense. If the woman wants it for that reason, yes, she should be allowed to have it.

 I come to my conclusions based on rationality and logic. I think this question, though, is too vague. Which other moral standards are you referring to? If someone, for example, is basing their stance on a book that simply gives them a rule, then I can say I have the advantage of using logic and reason to support my stance. Even in the event that someone takes their stance on emotional appeals on a different level, I can point to mine as taking a more rational approach (although in this particular debate there isn't a single argument that eliminates emotional appeals altogether with the possible exception of a nihilistic stance-my particular stance tends to distance me from it in a greater sense than others do, however).

you're eliminating all the other factors that I introduced. If you were to include everything I mentioned, and not just the point on practicality, then obviously, requiring the individual to give up their life would be immoral. 

It probably would have been best for me to say logical or rational. Regardless, I don't think your examples counter the complete arguments that I gave. 

Abortion=Oppresion?

 And let me guess, making so that a woman has no choice isn't opression

a clump of cell is really a person, we've heard that before.

1) Not everybody who supported slavery was free.

2) enslaving a being that is capeable of cognition, which is capeable of suffering, and which is a sentient being is not the same as aborting a fetus or blastocyst.

I offer what I think the clearest answer to the abortion issue, taken almost directly from the encyclical of Pope Paul VI Humanae Vitae.

If we cannot agree that an embryo in a mother's womb is a person, we still have a clear moral obligation to reject abortion as murder. To propose an example, consider that we are driving a car. On the way, we hear a story on the radio that a crazed murder has placed boxes in the middle of the street, some filled with tied-up school children and some not. Inside the box, he may have hid a busload of school children, but we don't know. We look up and see a large cardboard box in the middle of the road. Do we swerve away? YES! To act in such a way as to possibly commit murder is as bad as to commit murder itself. If I decided that, because I don't know whether it's filled with people or not, I ram every cardboard box I see at 98 miles per hour, I would be guilty of murder.

Yours In Christ, Eternal Wisdom,

StMichael 

You miss the point entirely. The point is not that some are children and some aren't. The point is that, assuming there is debate without a clear definition of when life begins, we must assume that a person is a person from conception onwards. Otherwise, we commit murder by intentionally killing something that could be one.

Yours In Christ, Eternal Wisdom,

StMichael 

Doesn't that logic imply that every menstruating female is a murderer? That egg could be a person (because we don't have a clear definition of the beginning of life, there's no reason we have to assume it starts at conception).

Guys who masturbate must be serial killers in your logic, also. 

First, me believing personhood starts at conception has no influence on why you ought to believe it. The reason you ought to believe it is in the reason I gave. You still haven't addressed it.

Second, a menstrating female does not kill anyone directly if she is discharging unfertilized eggs. If she had concieved a child and then menstrated, she would also not be guilty of murder, any more than a woman is guilty of murder if she has a miscarriage. Involuntary actions are not moral actions. A man who masturbates is not a serial killer, because he does not kill a human being (under ordinary circumstances) when he masturbates. His emission of sperm does not kill a human being; no child was concieved. His crime falls under a different moral category.

 Third, murder is murder regardless of context. Further, if that is your definition, the Nazis never murdered a single person, neither did Mao, or Stalin. Every single action committed by a dictator with genocide in mind is entirely justified according to your logic. Which would also mean the dissolution of the state, as there are no rules on which to base the state. Recognize the absurdity in your statements before you make them.

Yours In Christ, Eternal Wisdom,

StMichael 

The fundamental law being broken is not the law of the state, but the natural and, ultimately, the eternal law. Without these, it leads to the absurd and horrendous consequences that I outlined earlier.

 I am not being defensive. Your comment belies that you, my friend, are very defensive about your views. Any comment critical of them must be from a person who is not "really" open-minded.

Yours In Christ, Eternal Wisdom,

StMichael 

You're the one who threw in the word "could". An unfertilized egg and a sperm cell "could" be a human being. If you're logic sounds faulty when someone follows it to it's conclusion, don't balme thc conclusion.  

The problems with your school bus analogy is that it involves actual people that one is avoiding killing. I also don't know any homeless people living in cardboard boxes who sleep in the middle of the road. If you're going off the road nailing cardboard boxes in the hopes of crushing homeless people, you have problems.

Or doesn't your church talk about the motivations behind actions anymore? Wait, maybe they don't. Confession and absolution covers all, right?  

Ok, I want to nominate StMichael for the Most Irrational Person On The Site Award! (capitals intentional)

OK, the people killed by Nazis, dictators, etc were actual people, capable of thought and emotion not clusters of cells incapable of living on their own. Just because they are capable of developing into people so what? With cloning technology, we could very soon create a person from every cell in the body - by your logic every time you scratch your nose you are guilty of mass murder!