Loosening my pro choice stance.

[brewer]

A cheek scraping does not have the potential to naturally develop into a fully formed human being. That is an essential difference.

So if we ever developed human cloning, would you change your position so that every single shed human cell is included in your ardent forced-birtherism? Or is your care for potential for human life selective and arbitrary?

Before you focus in on the word "naturally" in your sentence, I'd remind you that current cloning technology fully includes implanting embryos so that they naturally develop, after coming from genetic material.

Lets throw in the fertilized egg that could "naturally develop into a fully formed human being" but never implants (not through human intervention). By the time implantation should occur the "human" has undergone cell division several times. Is that terminating a "human life"?

[Minimalist]

A fetus is genetically human. So is a cheek scraping.

A cheek scraping does not have the potential to naturally develop into a fully formed human being. That is an essential difference.

Only to your warped way of thinking.

[Neo-Scholastic]

So if we ever developed human cloning, would you change your position so that every single shed human cell is included in your ardent forced-birtherism?

No. I am using the word 'potential' in the Scholastic sense, as in the inherent potency of a thing that is part of that thing's essence. An active intervention would be required in order for shed cells to gain the essential quality of humanity. Prior to the any such intervention the cells would not have that potency as part of their being.

To say “forced birth” is akin to saying that preventing a teenage suicide is “forced-aging”. Its fundamentally dishonest. The interventions that discourage abortions stop an act of violence against a vulnerable human being. You can debate the merits of discouraging that violence or allowing it to occur, but you cannot define it away with Orwellian double-speak.

Or is your care for potential for human life selective and arbitrary?

No, but yours is and you seem not to care. You are a complete hypocrite. Name one justification for abortion that could not also justify infanticide.

...current cloning technology fully includes implanting embryos so that they naturally develop, after coming from genetic material.

It does not matter how the process starts. The issue is how you justify stopping a process that is already underway.

As I said the point of the OP seems to be that any such justifications for abortion must be made with appeals to pragmatic and political considerations and not biological facts or the ontological status of very young human beings.

[Ben Davis]

Name one justification for abortion that could not also justify infanticide.

Where the birth of the child will kill both the mother and child.

As I said the point of the OP seems to be that any such justifications for abortion must be made with appeals to pragmatic and political considerations and not biological facts or the ontological status of very young human beings.

Not at all. Biological viability - the point at which a child, once born, would nominally survive birth - is based on biological facts. Emergent brain function - the point at which the brain starts to work - is based on biological facts. The use of both of these points in time to determine the point at which it's ethical to describe the foetus as a person and ascribe certain rights to it which prevent termination of pregnancy are both biologically factual and ontologically stated. You misrepresent the highly complex and difficult work done by the medical and legal professions to describe supportable protections to both mother and child which balance the rights of both.

[Divinity]

It's 500 years from now, and we now have the technology to remove a fertilized egg from a woman and grow it into a human in the lab. Yay science!

You have in your hands a fertilized egg. It's an egg donated by a woman who did not want her child (she was raped), and who doesn't have a loving family waiting for them if they're born. A mad man comes in holding a 3 month old child. He says "Crush that egg by the time I get to 5, or I'm going to bash this baby's brains in." You have no other recourse of options. You can't reach him by the time he gets to 5--you're sure he'd bash the 3 month old's brians in before you got to him in any case.

What do you do? Do you let him smash the baby's brain? Or do you smash the egg? How long do you have to think about it?

[Neo-Scholastic]

You misrepresent the highly complex and difficult work done by the medical and legal professions to describe supportable protections to both mother and child which balance the rights of both.

The moral issues of abortion are indeed complex. That is why I insist on clarity, distinguishing between philosophical/theological considerations, legal definitions, and practical implications.

Name one justification for abortion that could not also justify infanticide.

Where the birth of the child will kill both the mother and child.

I would consider that a valid justification because, like the Street Car problem, no proposed solution satisfies our moral reasoning. That extreme circumstance is relatively rare and that particular dilemma does not present itself for the vast majority of abortions. Even still, the question remains in the domain of civil law and revolves around the legal definition of a ‘person’. People have proposed many arbitrary dividing lines such as viability, vaginal birth, or the onset of consciousness.

Biological viability - the point at which a child, once born, would nominally survive birth - is based on biological facts.

Not really. Medical technology keeps pushing the age of viability forward. A fetus that is viable is viable in Boston would not be viable in rural North Korea. Likewise a viable fetus in 2016 would not have been viable in 1916. Would termination of pregnancy at the same stage of development been moral in the past but not today?

Emergent brain function - the point at which the brain starts to work - is based on biological facts.

The ability to feel pain happens at about seven weeks after conception, if not earlier. Few proponents of legal abortion would accept that as the point at which to grant personhood to the human fetus. Some bioethicists, like Peter Singer, have proposed that personhood should be granted only after the child has a sense of self, around the age of 2 years old.

One way or another, the proponents of legal abortion who wish to make a moral argument, like the autonomy and bodily integrity of the mother, must philosophically justify assigning rights to one kind of human being and not another. This raises the question: do humans have rights simply by virtue of being human? Many on AF believe rights are granted by the State rather than being ground in human nature, i.e. basically rights depend on the whims of whoever is in power. Under that concept of rights, abortion proponents are not making a moral claim; but rather, rationalizing their desires from a position of power.

[Simon Moon]

You have no say in the choices I make about my body, and if you think you do, kindly fuck off.

My take-away from the OP is that the poster now understands that abortion is a moral and political issue. The biological facts are what they are. A fetus is a human being. The legal status, value, and potential rights of that human being are the subjects of debate - not the biology .Biologically, a fetus is a distinct organism (body) from the mother despite the fact that it is dependent upon her. So your point is moot.

Here's a scenario.

An orphan 6 month old baby, in order to survive, needs to an adult act as a life support system for 9 months. 

As it turns out, you are the only person that could be found that is genetically capable of fulfilling this role. You will have he same risks as a pregnant woman has. 

Would you be okay with the government forcing you to act as life support for this infant?

[downbeatplumb]

Until two nights ago i used to think the pro lifer movement was just another faction of religiously charged pseudo science like Young earth creationism.But after reading this essay in opposition to abortion on RW I'm uncertain if I could ever call myself "pro-choice" anymore. http://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Essay:Why_I...e_abortion

"In the late 1960's the pro-choice movement made a deliberate, strategic decision to trivialize the abortion debate by dismissing all pro-life arguments as mere Catholic dogma. This made it easy to gloss over the inconvenient, undeniable scientific embryological fact that human life begins at conception in favor of specious arguments regarding church/state separation and accusation that religion "is being forced down our throats." Planned Parenthood today still insists that the question of when life begins is a religious one which varies from woman to woman, apparently mind-dependent rather than reality-dependent. They do draw the line at the old Mayan practice of throwing infants into volcanos, although I don't see why, under their theory, that wouldn't be a protected exercise of religion as well. I've seen more of a reliance on science - embryology, ultrasound - on the pro-life side than on the pro-choice side. In fact, the mainstream pro-choice organizations oppose showing women who are considering abortion ultrasound pictures of the child on the grounds that they are "confusing." It should be noted that the pro-choice side isn't opposed to raising religious arguments when it suits them. Planned Parenthood has hired clergy to promote abortion from a theological standpoint. The Religious Coalition for Reproductive Choice devotes its very existence to that endeavor. Ironically, even the atheistic Freedom from Religion Foundation employs a religious argument when it comes to abortion - it argues that the practice should be permitted because it isn't expressly forbidden by the Bible."

Desperate women have always and always will have abortions. The difference now is that women don't die from back street abortionists or by throwing themselves downstairs to try and self abort. If abortions were made illegal women would start dying at the hands of unscrupulous unregulated abortionists. Its the worst of all answers.