Ireland legalizes the killing of the unborn

[Sparko]

When the liberals want to be anti-cop, they can always come up with "well, why couldn't the cop shoot the gun out of the hand of the bad guy", or, "why isn't there any other way besides killing the bad guy"..... and those decisions are often made in milliseconds.

In the case of a pregnancy, it's every excuse imaginable to terminate the life.

Why can't they shoot the baby out of the womb?

[Sparko]

Which makes me wonder what he thinks a baby is that's half way out of the birth canal, held in place and killed (aborted), which is what happens during a partial birth abortion. Is the part sticking out of the mother a baby with the rest still a non-living clump of cells? Is it a half-baby?

He has already said that he believes it is not alive until it takes a breath.

[Mountain Man]

...if you view abortion as murder, you must also view miscarriages as natural deaths...

I do.

[KingsGambit]

In cases where a woman is pregnant as a result of rape and it's going to cause economic hardship, I'd like to think there are many compassionate Christians in the US who are more than willing to step in and help. (I also personally believe once the rapist gets out of jail, he should get all his wages garnished for child support until the child is 18, by the maximum amount allowed under law.)

[Cow Poke]

In cases where a woman is pregnant as a result of rape and it's going to cause economic hardship, I'd like to think there are many compassionate Christians in the US who are more than willing to step in and help. (I also personally believe once the rapist gets out of jail, he should get all his wages garnished for child support until the child is 18, by the maximum amount allowed under law.)

We have a man in town who told me about 5 years ago if that situation ever comes up, he wants to help. His mother was raped, and he is the product of that. He is an incredibly generous man.

[Tassman]

Ah, so you think they magically turn into Babies as they pass through the birth canal! You're even dumber than I thought!

[Mountain Man]

That's only because you're a moral monster who goes against logic and basic scientific fact to deny that the fetus is an innocent human life.

[Starlight]

It's amusing how simplistic and emotion-based the anti-abortion arguments are. It would be funny if adherents of the view weren't so passionate about it, as it is, it's just sad.

Anti-abortionists come across to me like the Fruitarians who only eat fruit that has fallen from the plant in order to make sure they don't harm plants. In both cases its a totally misplaced sense of "we utterly must do no harm at all, to this particular thing I've arbitrarily ceased upon as being really important to do no harm to."

CP's focus on the linguistics of it all demonstrates how shallow his morality is. To him, we wouldn't want to hurt a "baby", and therefore if you can creatively relabel the fetus as a "baby", then it must be protected too, QED. And so his 'morality' becomes a matter of playing word games.

Whereas for those of us more consistent than him in our moral views, what matters is degree of mental function possessed. The reason we are not interested in harms to rocks or to plants is because those things posses no mental functions - only conscious entities can suffer morally relevant harms of any kind. He can relabel fetuses as babies and play word games until the cows come home, but that doesn't in any way affect the actual underlying mental functions of the fetus/baby, which is what is relevant to the morality of the situation.

Of course, those of us who don't mind abortion do differ slightly in which mental functions we think are important. For example, from previous discussion, I believe you've expressed the view that you see the development of the central nervous system, bringing with it the mental ability of the fetus to experience pain, around 26 weeks of gestation as being an appropriate cut off. And that is an understandable choice because ending its existence painlessly seems much preferable to ending it painfully. The philosophers Seer cites take the view that the morally relevant mental function is the ability to attribute value to one's own existence, which develops post-birth (they are non-specific as to when). Personally, I am agnostic as to which of the many mental functions are the most morally relevant and do not myself attempt to assign a value judgement as to their relative importance, but take the view that we can take a 10,000 foot perspective and say there exists a continuum from insect through to adult human on the mental function continuum, and we can place birds, cats, monkeys etc at various points on that continuum, and as a fetus & baby develops it moves along that continuum, and the level of wrongness in harming it is associated with the point it is at along the continuum.

So even though we may differ slightly in which particular mental functions we assign the most value to, we can see that each other's positions on abortion are informed by assigning value to mental functions, and if the fetus has mental functions below the threshold, then we are more okay with abortion than we would be if it had higher mental function. And yet, despite the fact that we have had these views for years and CP has discussed the topic extensively with us, he is still foolish and ignorant enough to believe that if only he can twist how the word "baby" is used a little bit, that that might have some sort or relevance to the topic.

[Mountain Man]

At the moment of conception, the resulting organism:

1) Meets even the most conservative scientific definition of life.
2) Has human DNA.
3) Is guilty of no legal or moral wrong.

Therefore, abortion kills an innocent human life.

Q.E.D.

[Roy]

In cases where a woman is pregnant as a result of rape and it's going to cause economic hardship, I'd like to think there are many compassionate Christians in the US who are more than willing to step in and help. (I also personally believe once the rapist gets out of jail, he should get all his wages garnished for child support until the child is 18, by the maximum amount allowed under law.)

Your post implies that the woman (and her partner if she has one) would have to raise the baby she/they didn't want.

[Charles]

At the moment of conception, the resulting organism:

1) Meets even the most conservative scientific definition of life.
2) Has human DNA.
3) Is guilty of no legal or moral wrong.

Therefore, abortion kills an innocent human life.

Q.E.D.

With no intention of derailing this thread: If "the resulting organism" is guilty of no legal or moral wrong then at what point is it influenced by original sin according to you? Is it at birth? Is it literally "born a sinner"? or what?

[Starlight]

At the moment of conception, the resulting organism:

1) Meets even the most conservative scientific definition of life.
2) Has human DNA.
3) Is guilty of no legal or moral wrong.

Therefore, abortion kills an innocent human life.

Q.E.D.

Your skin cells have human DNA. Guess you better not itch or wash, else you'll kill all those 'innocent lives'.

The difference is, they don't have minds. Somehow, once again, you manage to give a syllogism that doesn't mention minds. It's almost like you've been debating this for years, yet failed to learn the absolute basics about your opponents' views that entire time.

Also, I'd note that embryos, as entities that have yet to development minds, aren't 'innocent' anymore than a rock is 'innocent', because they have yet to develop the mental capacities that allow for guilt/innocence.

[lilpixieofterror]

Your skin cells have human DNA. Guess you better not itch or wash, else you'll kill all those 'innocent lives'.

The difference is, they don't have minds. Somehow, once again, you manage to give a syllogism that doesn't mention minds. It's almost like you've been debating this for years, yet failed to learn the absolute basics about your opponents' views that entire time.

Also, I'd note that embryos, as entities that have yet to development minds, aren't 'innocent' anymore than a rock is 'innocent', because they have yet to develop the mental capacities that allow for guilt/innocence.

[Mountain Man]

Your skin cells have human DNA. Guess you better not itch or wash, else you'll kill all those 'innocent lives'.

Skin cells do not meet even a loose definition of a lifeform, you scientifically illiterate buffoon.

The difference between my argument and your "minds" kabuki dance is that my argument is based on irrefutable fact and unassailable logic. There's no guesswork, no opinion, no arbitrary valuation of an attribute. To disagree with my argument is to disagree with basic science, a point I explored last year in a thread titled "Pro-Abortionists are Anti-Science". As I astutely observed then:

So many arguments in favor of abortion do everything they can to downplay [the fact that a fetus is an innocent human life]. They want to focus on "viability", or "personhood", or "sentience", or other similarly nebulous terms, and they refer to the unborn as a "parasite", or "lump of tissue", or "blob of goo", anything to avoid the fact that it is a human life, even to the point of objecting to ultrasound technology on the basis that it makes the debate harder for them when people can see for themselves that it is a developing human life.

So I ask again, why is "settled science" supposedly good enough for deciding environmental policy, or for dictating what should be taught in the classroom, but not good enough when it comes to deciding the fate of the unborn?

[Mountain Man]

With no intention of derailing this thread: If "the resulting organism" is guilty of no legal or moral wrong then at what point is it influenced by original sin according to you? Is it at birth? Is it literally "born a sinner"? or what?

"Original sin" simply means that we are all born with the capacity to sin, and born into a world where from the very earliest moment of our lives we are taught to sin, even if only by example. We are all sinners because at least once in our lives, we willingly chose to do what we knew was wrong even though it was within our ability to do what we knew was right. The logical implication, of course, is that prior to this moment of moral awareness, we are sinless.