If you're pro-life, how far do you take that?

[LadyForCamus]

I remembered we do have at least one atheist pro lifer. I'd be interested to hear their stance here. That was a while ago that I read them say that though so I guess they could have changed their mind since then.

I am seriously conflicted on abortion.

Do you mean you're conflicted on whether it should be a legal matter? Or just about the ethics?

I'd say that anyone who thinks there are no ethics to consider whatsoever is oversimplifying the issues as much as someone running around with "abortion is murder" posters. Personally I see being pro choice as the lesser of two evils. As with all things in life, it's about the best compromise given the situations we find ourselves in.

Yeah, I couldn’t have said that better myself.  It’s a true moral dilemma for me, but forcing women to continue a pregnancy that they don’t want is no solution.

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I am seriously conflicted on abortion.

I'm conflicted about it, too. Not about the legality of it. I think abortion, at a societal level, is more or less a good thing. It gives options to those who do not have the resources/desire to raise a child properly. It reduces the number of children in poverty, and it respects the bodily sovereignty of a woman. These are all positives.

My problem with it comes about due to ethical concerns. If it was my decision to make, would it be morally correct to say "yes" to an abortion? It's not a decision I ever will foreseeably make (being a single, reclusive male with no aspirations to marry or have kids), but I can consider hypotheticals.

To me, killing a newborn infant is wrong, pure and simple, in 99.9999% of cases. I mean, it would have to be an "out there" scenario like: "This kid is carrying a strain of ebola that could wipe out humanity" to make me consider the killing of an infant permissible. To me all persons (including infants and adults) have a right to live, so killing is wrong in any case. I'm even opposed to the death penalty in all instances.

So then I ask myself: What changes as far as the child's right to live by one slip-and-slide down the uterus? Nothing really. So I must conclude that a child is a "person" even in the womb. Viability outside the womb is a common measuring stick brought up in philosophical debates, but for various reasons (which I won't get into here) I find this mark to be arbitrary.

On the other end of the process, I don't think personhood begins at conception. Again, it's an arbitrary mark, only meaningful to us to mark when a biological process begins; it is not ethically relevant. Furthermore, there is a phase, post-conception, in which cells are totipotent, that is to say, we could separate them in a laboratory and grow many different individuals in test tubes if we so desired. Personhood then, must logically begin after this phase. I would have no moral conflict in saying "yes" to remove a group of totipotent cells from a womb.

The long and short of it is: I would feel most comfortable (ethically) saying "yes" to an abortion in early term/first trimester, and morally compelled to say "no" in late term/third trimester. As philosophically dissatisfying as that position is... it's the best I can come up with. Again, this is all assuming that it is my decision--which, again, is unlikely to ever happen.

At a legal level, I am comfortable with late term abortions being prohibited. I think it is a reasonable compromise. And I also see where pro-lifers are coming from. I do not immediately assume that they oppose women's rights (though it is doubtless that it's probably the motivation for a rotten handful of them). I think pro lifers are probably coming from the same place I am. Wanting to respect human life.

Politically, I'll probably never vote Republican, so I am de facto pro choice. Also, as I said in the first paragraph, I think abortion has many societal benefits, and legal abortion respects a woman's right to make her own decisions concerning her own body. So my pro choice position goes a bit further than "de facto." 

When we, as a society, get our shit together enough to stop fighting meaningless wars that squander our resources... when we, as a society stop allowing a vast portion of our population struggle to survive in ghettos... when we as a society can ensure that every child who is born can be given a fair chance to live their lives free of poverty and exploitation... come talk to me and I might budge from my pro choice position in favor of finding a place in which every child can be born, live, and thrive. But if you don't advocate for the welfare of the living, don't try to tell me anything about the welfare of the unborn who are soon to join them.

I agree with you on the issue of viability as a cut-off.  IMO, it’s incomplete. It doesn’t address the experience of the living thing that is being considered.  Can it hear, see, taste, feel, and dream? Can it experience stress, and comfort? Around 19ish weeks, these experiential properties start to emerge. One position might be that a fetus having the ability to react to stimuli doesn’t qualify it as a being but we’re still talking about permanently ending a living thing’s experiences, however rudimentary those experiences may be compared to ours.