Abortion......I will now use my psychic powers to predict the most popular....

[Lorizael]

Life's not fair, no, but does that mean we're not allowed to try to make it so?

Despite how human the embryo may one day be, the eternal question is what it is at the time of abortion.

Hmm, what's the accepted definition of life? There are a number of criteria scientists generally use to determine if something is alive. They are...

Homeostasis
Reproduction
Reaction to stimuli
Consumption of resources

Are there any other criteria? And is there a time when a human embryo fails to meet these criteria? If so, I would say that abortion should be allowed then. After it meets the criteria for a living organism, however, I'd say that abortion is then murder.

[Elok]

This is not a difficult concept, bud. The embryo turns into the baby eventually. You are killing the exact same organism regardless of the time you do it. There is no magical fetus fairy who swaps out the ugly-looking form and replaces it with a baby. I'm pretty sure most pro-choicers have in fact had sex ed in elementary school, so I'm inclined to wonder whether there is some sort of shared synaptic dysfunction at work or if it's just common intellectual cowardice. Hard to say, really.
And as for trying to make life fair, that's what I was arguing by choosing the least of many evils, i.e. delivering the child. It's the least unfair option to all parties concerned. Can't get much more just than that without a time machine.

[Jon Miller]

Originally posted by Cruddy
Personally, I never comment on abortion.

Why?

Because I'm a bloke. It's none of my business.

Personally, I never comment on the holocaust.

Why?

Because I'm a gentile. It's none of my business.

Jon Miller

[Drogue]

Originally posted by Lorizael
There are a number of criteria scientists generally use to determine if something is alive. They are...

Homeostasis
Reproduction
Reaction to stimuli
Consumption of resources

Are there any other criteria?

I'm sure a staunch pro-choicer might consider seperate from the mother as the criteria for being a seperate human being. While the babies still connected to the mother via the umbilical chord, it is still part of the mother, and thus she can speak for it.

This is just an idea, not necessarily my personal opinion... although I play Devil's Advocate so much, sometimes I'm unsure what my opinion is

[Gibsie]

A staunch pro-choicer would say, "Babies can't reproduce".

[Urban Ranger]

Originally posted by Elok
This is not a difficult concept, bud. The embryo turns into the baby eventually. You are killing the exact same organism regardless of the time you do it.

Asserting a zygote is an organism stretches things just a tad bit.

Originally posted by Elok
There is no magical fetus fairy who swaps out the ugly-looking form and replaces it with a baby. I'm pretty sure most pro-choicers have in fact had sex ed in elementary school, so I'm inclined to wonder whether there is some sort of shared synaptic dysfunction at work or if it's just common intellectual cowardice. Hard to say, really.

What's your point? As I pointed out repeatedly before, a zygote is physically no different from any other body cell. If you assert that zygotes are humans, so are your body cells.

[Elok]

My body cells are present in my body itself, not a uterus. My body cells serve a definite function within my body, whether as muscle, organ, nerve, bone, whatever. Short of remarkable genetic tinkering, my body cells will never become independent human beings. My body cells have, barring minor mutations, the exact same DNA as any other given body cell, and are part of the organism known to you as Elok. This is not rocket science. The zygote, even if you refuse to call it an organism now, is biologically destined to become an independent organism. You are using weak and irrelevant technicalities.
As for drogue: First of all, the fetus is within the woman's body, but that does not make it part of her body. Benign bacteria in the stomach for example. You don't call them a part of the woman(in the same sense as her liver or her femur, for example), do you? Secondly, custodial rights, among the already born, do not extend to the point of termination except as euthanasia for the terminally ill who have given a living will or specified against extraordinary measures. You might have a precedent for children/fetuses with fatal defects but the analogy(and I'd like to restate my loathing for analogies here) isn't generally applicable.

[Drogue]

No, but the women doesn't have to kill it. She can remove her services. She doesn't agree to have her body be used by foetus. Thus she can decide not to let her body be used by the foetus. If the foetus servives on the outside, so be it. If it doesn't, then it dies. Thus you can abort foetuses that cannot survive on the outside, but not those that can, as the law is currently IIRC. The next of kin can decide to pull the plug if something can't live independantly, and cannot speak for itself. The mother can do the same.

[Lorizael]

I never said the embryo is magically transformed into a full blown human at some specific time. Don't be obstinate. But a clump of cells sitting in the uterus feeding off of the mother is not a human. Not yet. And before it is a human, it has none of the rights that a human has. There's a point at which that embryo has no concept of self, no thoughts, no memories, no perceptions. There is no reality to that thing because it has yet to develop into a person.

The organism is most definetely not the same thing the entire time. If it were, there would be no need for a nine month pregnancy. If the man and the woman ****ed and then out popped a baby several minutes later, then I'd say the human had been present the entire time. But that's not reality.

The reality is that over the course of nine months an embryo is transformed, very slowly, into a human being and that during the course of that development it requires things that an ordinary human being would not require, because it isn't human yet.

Why should a thing without the capability to recognize its own existence take precadence over an actual, matured human being.

[Elok]

It should not take precedence, but in this case it doesn't. If the woman had to die instead of the child, that would be taking precedence. Here we just value the existence of one less than the convenience/mental health of another, which is something of a biological prejudice.
And I did not say the organism is the same the entire time. At least, not the same in FORM. You do not seem to be arguing against the statement that it is the same life form from two minutes to twenty days to 105 years of age. A fetus is not a person in the same sense that a caterpillar is not a butterfly. What the hell do you think it's going to become, meatloaf? I am aware of the gradual transformation, but a transformation so inevitable might as well be assumed not to exist. To stop the existence of the infant form is to prevent the future existence of the adult form. I still cannot comprehend what kind of perverted mental block you are using to hide from reality to this extent.
And finally,

There's a point at which that embryo has no concept of self, no thoughts, no memories, no perceptions. There is no reality to that thing because it has yet to develop into a person.

I think you take Descartes WAY too literally. If I believed the lack of thought implied the absence of human rights, I'd just whack you with a blackjack, slit your carotid while you were unconscious, and end this debate the easy way. I don't because I don't, so to speak. That, and I don't know where you live. That puts a damper on it too...
Drogue: "Okay, but on my way out of the room, I'm going to kick at the air. If you happen to fill that air, it's your fault!"
Or do you watch the Simpsons?

[Lorizael]

Originally posted by Elok
It should not take precedence, but in this case it doesn't. If the woman had to die instead of the child, that would be taking precedence. Here we just value the existence of one less than the convenience/mental health of another, which is something of a biological prejudice.
And I did not say the organism is the same the entire time. At least, not the same in FORM. You do not seem to be arguing against the statement that it is the same life form from two minutes to twenty days to 105 years of age. A fetus is not a person in the same sense that a caterpillar is not a butterfly. What the hell do you think it's going to become, meatloaf? I am aware of the gradual transformation, but a transformation so inevitable might as well be assumed not to exist. To stop the existence of the infant form is to prevent the future existence of the adult form. I still cannot comprehend what kind of perverted mental block you are using to hide from reality to this extent.
And finally,

I think you take Descartes WAY too literally. If I believed the lack of thought implied the absence of human rights, I'd just whack you with a blackjack, slit your carotid while you were unconscious, and end this debate the easy way. I don't because I don't, so to speak. That, and I don't know where you live. That puts a damper on it too...
Drogue: "Okay, but on my way out of the room, I'm going to kick at the air. If you happen to fill that air, it's your fault!"
Or do you watch the Simpsons?

To ignore the gradual development because it is gradual is awfully convenient for you, but there's really no reason for you to do that. A little bit over a lot of time is still a lot.

And I'm not speaking philosophically here. If you knock me unconscious, I'll still be thinking, I guarantee that. But an embryo has yet to develop to the point where it can think at all. I don't care what it will be, I care what it isn't when it's destroyed. You don't understand that.

And stop assuming I'm some horribly sick person trying to ignore the truth so that I can kill babies at my whim. It's not conducive to having constructive discussions.

And at the beginning of this thread I stated that my stance on abortion is sitll kinda wavy. You do make some convincing points, but I'm more playing devil's advocate than anything else.

[Jack the Bodiless]

My body cells have, barring minor mutations, the exact same DNA as any other given body cell, and are part of the organism known to you as Elok.

I do not know the entity "Elok" as a collection of living cells. I know the entity "Elok" as a collection of posts on Apoyton. From those, I deduce "Elok" to be an intelligence.

"Elok" could be an alien, or an artificial intelligence (unlikely given current technology, but possible in future). I do not consider the physical shell to be of importance, except for its role in sustaining the entity "Elok".

Without intelligence, there would be no "Elok". In early pregnancy, there was no brain, hence no intelligence, hence no "Elok".

[Elok]

No, Lorizael, I do not understand it, because it does not seem to derive from any sort of rational process. Your view of reality seems to base itself on temporary conditions, utterly irrelevant in the long term. You still cannot argue against the fact that it is the same thing at any point in its development. Every woman who has an abortion knows that by destroying the fetus they are preemptively eliminating the person it will eventually become. That's pretty much the whole damned point. The difference is purely academic and arbitrary, but it functions as a buffer against one's conscience, which is why the institution still functions. If you keep playing "devil's advocate," the devil will win. That's why I don't do it.
And I don't think you're a sick person, I think you're using a bizarre mental block imposed by yourself or others to justify your current philosophy. It's disturbing because a discussion of medicine should not ignore basic fundamentals of life, e.g. "a fetus eventually develops into an infant."
And Jack, my mother has memories of morning sickness that beg to differ with you. I think I was there. I'm pretty sure that ugly little blob turned into me. It couldn't think then-I couldn't think then-but everybody knew there would come a day when it could. I was not yet fully formed, which made me in some ways easier to ignore, but I existed and I was biologically inclined to continue my developing existence until the day I was ready to argue in philosophical gibberish with you. The physical shell eventually grew a brain, which more or less IS the entity you call Elok. I could scoop out my brains to test that for you, but I don't think I'd be physically capable of telling you the results.

[Jack the Bodiless]

The "ugly little blob" turned into you, yes. So did one of your mother's ova, and one of your father's sperm.

If someone succeeded in scooping out your brain intact, and preserving it alive in a jar, while also maintaining your body on a life-support machine: where would you consider "you" to reside?

In my case, the answer is obvious.

[Boris Godunov]

Elok, preventing life is not the same as destroying it. By that rationale, birth control would indeed be murder. There is nothing immoral about preventing life--we do it all the time, even through abstinence. An egg isn't the same as a chicken, and a zygote isn't the same as a human.

Saying the zygote is biologically destined (although not all the time, as there often are natural occurences that prevent its living) to become a living being is an unsound argument, just as it is unsound to say that since you will die one day, it's okay to treat you as if you were already a corpse and bury you.

What matters is what the entity IS at the time of abortion. Unless the fetus is developed enough to be a conscious, sentient entity capable of independent survival (which is probably about midway through the second trimester), then I see nothing wrong with ending the pregnancy, as it is preventing human life, not destroying it. It is in no way comparable to murder, in which life is taken away from a sentient being that already possesses it.