(January 21, 2017 at 11:20 pm)Jesster Wrote:(January 21, 2017 at 11:11 pm)Tiberius Wrote: Ok, so now my question is why does that make a human a person? What is the reasoning behind that definition?
This is getting down to a semantics battle.
That actually doesn't concern me as much as the reasoning behind abortion. A woman should be able to decide when she doesn't want to care for another life in any form at any time. This is why we have adoption for viable children. If that life is still relying entirely on that person's body and another cannot take over, then that does not mean it owns any right to that person's body.
It has to be a semantics battle, because we all understand and agree that killing a person is wrong in most circumstances, and killing an innocent person is wrong is almost all circumstances. So yeah, if we are going to be killing what is undeniably an innocent human life, we better make damn sure that either (a) it's not a person, or (b) we can morally argue that the circumstances surrounding its killing are justified.
I have issues with both (a) and (b).
I don't believe an unborn baby "owns" a right to its mother's body. I do believe that people have a right to do whatever they like with their own bodies. However, I also believe that rights can come into conflict, and conflict resolution is an important part of making moral judgements. The right to life is the most important right, IMO. It trumps all other rights, because without it, all other rights are meaningless. Therefore, when you have a conflict between an unborn child's right to life, and the right of the mother to do what she wants with her own body, I believe that the most justified conflict resolution is to favor the right of the unborn child over that of the mother's.
The pro-choice response to this is to refuse to acknowledge that unborn children have rights, and whenever they try to argue that unborn children aren't "people" and therefore don't have rights, they come up with all sorts of wishy washy definitions to try and back up that view.
Regardless of when an unborn child becomes "viable", my main issue with the whole "only people have rights" argument is that it only seems to be used in regard to abortion; you never see it anywhere else. Elsewhere, we call them "human rights", and even animals are granted some rights. An unborn child is a human, something that is undeniable to anyone who has studied the science of DNA. When does it become human? From the moment of conception. That's a new human life, independent from its parents. That's when human rights should kick in.
Now I realize you personally never argued the above, so please don't call it a "strawman" because I'm not trying to suggest you argued this, I'm just commenting on another common argument I've seen from the pro-choice side.
