Abortion: 10 years as an atheist and I still don't get it

[Nihilist Virus]

You said it yourself - a foetus doesn't have the status of personhood.  Morality is only applicable to persons.

Insects have no personality or personhood. Does morality not apply to them?  Would it be morally acceptable if I dismembered them for my own amusement?

I view abortion as no more morally wrong than burning off a wart, removing an appendix, or pulling a tooth.

Why? Also, weird comparison. A fetus would be more comparable to a parasite. It's a different organism. Warts and teeth are part of the organism that is you.

Furthermore, I'm having more than a little trouble with your stricture that it is wrong to kill anything that is alive.

If you were a deity, would you construct a world wherein living things must kill one another to survive?  I'd hope not, because any such deity would be either stupid or evil.

Does this include disease vectors?

Oh. So you skimmed. Sigh.

"It is justified to take a life if that living being poses a direct and immediate threat to your own life (at least in my opinion it is)..."

Celery stalks?

Do you feel threatened by celery?

Suppose the police shoot and kill a man who is holding a classroom of  children hostage.  Is killing this man immoral if it prevents the deaths of 30 children?

Obviously the police are intervening on behalf of the children. Try to interpret my position with just a little charity for fuck sake.

While I understand that appeal to consequence is a fallacy, it is a very subjective and variable one.


Boru

Nope, it's objective.

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1) Morality is subjective. 

Therefore...?

2) A fetus cannot survive without my body. My body is my body, and nobody else's, even the fetus'. It's private. I don't have to explain why I find it moral or immoral because it's nobody else's beeswax. I don't think it's moral or immoral for someone else to have an abortion simply because it's not my body and none of my business. I don't get an opinion about that any more than I get an opinion on what my neighbor has for lunch.

By this logic jurors should just shrug and say, "Well the incident in question didn't involve me so it's none of my beeswax."

When the Nazis were gassing Jews, well, we were out of line to intervene because they can do with their citizens as they please.

Or do you see a problem there?

3) How is a man morally obligated to protect his family more than a woman is?

Generally, men are physically stronger.

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For NV - doesn't have much to do with atheism, I'm not sure why you'd think that ten years of atheism would impact your opinion here.

It seems to have impacted others. That's why I'm asking what I'm missing.

In a field of exclusively suboptimal choices, we seek to do the thing that would amount to the least objectionable.  This isn't a rule of humanity, mind you, just a rough description of what Good People™ do when they find themselves confronted with Bad Choices™, lol.  In deciding the final moral value of any given one of those choices as an act and how that yields a moral conclusion on the person we are considering moral desert.  

Would you deliver a child in a warzone?  If you thought that this was your duty, to carry a child in your womb and deliver it no matter the circumstances of that childs life, have you accomplished some good, or sought your own self interested satisfaction in being dutiful?  What kind of person does that, do you think?

Would I deliver a child in a warzone? What a wild question. I assume you're asking if there's any scenario in which an abortion would be the best course of action. In the context of war, human life has very little value, so I reckon there would be a scenario where an abortion is the tactical thing to do.

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You don’t have to get it. There’s nothing wrong with thinking abortion is morally unacceptable. Don’t have one. The problem comes when you try to force your moral views on a woman at the cost of her bodily autonomy.

Let me know if you get around to reading the OP.

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OP: I'm lost. Why is a male trying to make a morality judgement on a strictly female issue. 

Flirting with the ad hominem logical fallacy I see. Are you going to just come out and say that my argument is invalid because of who I am or are you going to just let the flirtatious tension linger?

Unless it's your breeding partner/fetus, why do you care? You should care more about the abortion option being taken from/never offered to women.

I'm asking what I'm missing. What the good argument is for abortion being morally acceptable. What I'm seeing is everyone blathering on about how inconvenient a child is, which is an appeal to consequences logical fallacy. If I wanted to sunbathe in logical fallacies I'd try to get unbanned from the Christian forums.

Feels like you're only a couple of steps away from pro-birther.

Lol, and to top it off you don't seem to have even looked at the OP.

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So please explain to me why abortion is morally acceptable or what I might be missing.

Most women who have abortions have children at other times, children they may not have had if they had not aborted the earlier fetus.  In other words, many women who have abortions are pregnant in the wrong circumstances for them to take care of a child.  You can't judge such cases in isolation.

But the real issue is awareness.  We are morally obligated to minimize suffering, but fetuses are typically not developed enough to feel pain.  Life itself is trivial without consciousness, which is why we don't feel much compunction about cutting down trees and killing bugs.

If I had the ability to annihilate planet earth in an instant, I would minimize suffering. But that would be immoral. So I think your approach is wrong.

Or... classic example. We have an emergency room with a brilliant engineer who needs a heart transplant, two billionaire philanthropists who each need a new kidney, and a homeless person with no friends or family who is a compatible donor to all three. So... we just give him happy drugs and take his organs. He feels no pain, and wonderful people survive. Suffering minimized. Is that the moral way to go about it?

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I suppose as far as morality is concerned, I find the idea of restraining a woman and forcing her to come to term against her will, possibly over a period of months, to be hideously immoral. (This would be if a woman is found to be attempting to get an abortion.) So it’s not so much about being moral, but rather avoiding the most immorality. I think that if you don’t enforce this totalitarian measure, but set administering abortions to be illegal, you’ll end up with at least as many abortions still taking place in secret but with more injury and death to the mothers.

I'm not even talking about that. Sure, give the woman the "free will" choice to do whatever she wants. Don't restrict her choice.

Now when she makes her choice, we can examine it and gauge the morality of it. In the case that she decides to abort, her actions are morally acceptable because...?