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

[tackattack]

@Gae Bolga I am engaging in introspection and conversation. I, like you, would advise someone, only if asked and acknowledging my own biases. So let's give it the same weight as the castle doctrine. If it's being done to you, then you have the right to defend your body. If it is for your own self-defense then it is justifiable. If it was entirely uncontrollable circumstance, then it was accidental.  If it was accidental, then legally and morally, if you had preventable ways to prevent the death you have an obligation to or it was reckless/negligent. If it was intentional, and didn't fall in the above, then it was murder.

Then there we have it, any and every abortion finds equal legal and moral justification under the uterine castle doctrine.

The castle doctrine doesn't state that you can only kill the fucker if you run out of other options. It doesn't require that you -know- anything about the person or their intentions, and it doesn't matter whether or not the person was "accidentally" trying to gain entry.

Even as you claim to accept this parity, you seek to add restrictions to the one not imposed on the other.

Castle laws also, do not provide civil immunity for wrongful death and have a much lower burden of proof. While they are not criminal, the potential father/grand parents would have rights for a civil wrongful death claim.


btw, I think this thread is too fast for me to keep up while at work, I'll check back tonight.

[The Grand Nudger]

Hey, I prefer things as they are, but if we're looking to create some dystopia where abortion is treated as a potential murder and with parity to other types of killing then we're going to end up with consequences like that.  

If you wanted parity, you'd be okay with the uterine castle doctrine -and- suing some hussy for damages on judge judy, lol.
(and any of the other things brought to your attention in other posts)

These problems are being created by your unwillingness to accept the reality of your opinions, their origin, their rationale, and what you really want and would or would not accept, and the inexorable consequences of their assumption.

[Nihilist Virus]

Forcing a women to carry the fetus to term against her will is equivalent to rape in my opinion

Hmm. Well I'd say it's closer to kidnapping, since you'd more or less have to do that to ensure she does not have the opportunity to destroy the fetus. But rape and kidnapping are closely related, at least legally speaking, as they both can carry a life sentence (but that is rarely enforced) and they both have varying degrees, including the least malicious kind (statutory rape, where it is "consensual" sex with, say, a 17 year old, and a parent "kidnapping" his/her child when the child does not even know a kidnap is occurring and is not in fear for his/her safety).

and weather the fetus is human or not is aside the point as even if it were it has no right to inhabit another being against their will or use elements of their body against their will ,

Of course the fetus is a human. What else would it be? A chipmunk? I assume you meant to say "person."

And you're right. As it happens a fetus more or less has no rights at all. But rights are a legal concept, and I'm talking about morality. I illustrated how the law has nothing to do with morality. I hope that is not a point in dispute because in my life I've found this to be painfully obvious.

And no we allow parenthood to be a choice if abortion were illegally pregnancy would not be a choice so that comparison will fail , And no the fetus is neither innocent or guilty I don't believe such terms can be used on a fetus .

Uh... ok...?

[The Grand Nudger]

-and you got what you wanted.

Abortion can be justified as a moral good and a moral imperative by, for example..reference to overpopulation, pain, misery, etc

Abortion can be justified as a final moral good and moral elective by reference to exclusively suboptimal decision fields, the least bad among bad options.

Abortion can be justified as the consequence of morally negative avoidance, that the prohibition of abortion is vastly worse than it's acceptance.

Good and imperative, least bad and elective, and worst if we don't regardless.  Is there some moral base uncovered? Any nominally rational person can accept all three of these. Any nominally rational person could disagree with one or more of these. No nominally rational person can disagree with all of these.

-and it only takes one for abortion to be morally justified.

[Nihilist Virus]

Sorry NV, it wasn't intentional to not engage, just missed in the scroll. I was attempting to navigate the topic without religiosity being thrown in. Homicide/genocide/killing is not moral, IMO , but can be justified or unjustified. Ie. I would kill to eat and feed my family. I would kill to prevent anaphylactic shock. I would kill to make a safer community. I would kill to defend myself or an individual unable to defend themselves. I would kill in war for an ideal. I would would have the moral weight of those killings on my conscience and the weights would differ based on my ideals and to the perceived value of the victim.

Ok. Well you're still avoiding the question.

Christianity stands or falls on one issue: the resurrection of Jesus Christ. That's it. If I proved that Jesus never performed any miracle whatsoever except the miracle of rising from the dead, I'd still prove Christianity true even while showing the majority of the gospels to be false. And the converse is true also: if you proved that Jesus did perform every miracle attributed to him in the gospels except for rising from the dead, and you inadvertently proved with absolute certainty that he did not rise, either physically or spiritually, then you would still be disproving Christianity.

Christians dodge questions, lie, and twist things around. But there's no reason for that. Just admit that the genocides of Joshua were immoral, because they quite obviously were. That will be a blow to your religion, sure, but it won't be the death knell. At the very least just admit that you disagree with the decision but that you trust God. But when you dodge and lie, or play stupid games, you're not advertising your beliefs with nobility. I don't think to myself, "I want to be a part of that group! Look how dishonest and underhanded they are! Sign me up!"

If Christians would just be honest and honorable in debate then we'd respect your opinion. So until you guys can do that, you'd be of better service to the unborn by saying nothing because when you open your mouth about abortion you're just going to piss people off.

[Divinity]

@Divinity The stigma and majority issues aside, shouldn't people struggle with the decision? It would be those that don't struggle (fetus are like a wart) with the decision I would be concerned with.

No, they fucking shouldn't.  Why should they?  To make your delicate sensibilities feel better?  Give me a fucking break.  Women and Girls should NOT be treated like fucking second class citizens, whose lives are put behind that of the fetus inside them.

[Nihilist Virus]

Thought experiment.  Consider a fetus which, in your mind, would be better off aborted. Suppose we forgo the abortion. Now wind the clock forward 20 years.  Are you going to advise this person to commit suicide?  Because they are impoverished or severely disabled or deformed, would your sincere and most helpful form of advice be that they kill themselves? Because if that's not what you would advise, then you would have to agree that their state of life, however suboptimal, is better than nonexistence.  Which again funnels back to my point which you disagreed with: that abortion is (obviously) the worst case scenario for the fetus.

What I would or wouldn't advise a person to do often hinges on my own biases rather than whether or not that thing can be morally justified.  In abortion or suicide, that either can be morally justified doesn't amount to me thinking that it's a good idea, or thinking that it's a good idea to tell someone else to do them, or that it's any of my business to advise a person in either case.  If someone sought my opinion, and the reasons they gave for either weren't lucid, I'd pipe up and say as much, but if they were...I'd have to tell them that I understood, and that it was clearly a difficult decision - that..maybe, they should seek advise from someone more qualified than myself.  OFC I could tell them what I would or wouldn't do...but that's just me, there's always that caveat.  

Then again, maybe you would advise suicide. I don't know. To be consistent you'd pretty much have to. But I'm not the kind of person who would walk into a school for the disabled and blurt out something like, "Y'all shoulda been aborted, and y'all should kill yourselves."

I've found myself in situations where I definitely thought that a person should commit suicide while they still had the chance, situations where I would toy with the idea... but that's not the sort of thing I tell people even when I think it.  

As for me, I find self preservation to be a compelling drive. Maybe not everyone here feels the same way.  Preservation of offspring is certainly not a priority. I get the feeling some people here would be like, "Oh, what's that, doc? My baby has a wart on its face? K, let's just abort and start over."

Self preservation is certainly a compelling drive, as is the preservation of offspring, but that doesn't certify the drive as moral or rational.  I'm not really sure that a baby having warts is something that many expecting mothers lose sleep over and consider an abortion for.   

I'll give you an example of real life decisions.  My wife and I both love kids.  We wanted to have eight kids.  Unfortunately for us both, we didn't meet when she was 16.  She was in her late thirties, and had a family history of complications.  Every pregnancy was going to be high risk.  The first, our big girl...went south hard at delivery, the nerves in her right arm were severed from the spinal cord, and my wife nearly died in the process.  My daughter had to be resuscitated at delivery.  It was horrifying.  The OBGYN later described it as the worst delivery she'd ever been a part of.  

Thing is, we knew the risks going in.  We were made aware many months beforehand that something like this could happen if it even went to term, that every indicator was present.  We had to have the abortion conversation..and we even had to have the "if it goes south and it's me or her, what do we want" convo.  Can you imagine me responding to my wife with any of the prissy shit that you seem to think is relevant?  Both of us have ideological disagreements with abortion..but reality has a way of challenging prior commitments.  The sort of despair and uncertainty it took to get my wife to consider it and bring it up to me doesn't take a mind reader to work out - and it wouldn't be done with her after she had the baby.    

Our second went off without a hitch.  Our third was a gestational diabetes shitshow - but my first son!  Then we had two failures.  We considered calling it quits.  Three, however, is not eight...so we decided to give it another go.  Another boy...but this time, she was in her forties, with a family history of complications, one disabled child, gestational diabetes,  and a less than pristine body wrecked by three full pregnancies in 5 years and two miscarriages.  Nothing went right.  Again we knew months beforehand, and better than we realized the first time, how bad things could get.  We had to have the convo again, we went through with it again.  He spent the first month or so of his life under a hood, on a ventilator, ivs,  tube fed.  Couldn't even touch him.  We had to go back and forth to the hospital to visit him.  So..you know, we got fixed after that, couldn't take it anymore.  

During all of this, for years.. we had been driving to and fro to Cinci to a research outfit for our first girl.  Huge arrays of needles prodding and sending charges into her not because there was anything they could do for her, or anything they would promise us, but because the data might one day help some kid.  Then there was the PT.  She never crawled, because she couldn't.  We didn't sleep for fear that she would roll over, and, unable to use her arm to right herself..suffocate beside us.  Our first physical therapist tried for about 6 months....then quit, in tears.  My wife lost her job for missed time.  Then we lost our car because we had to choose between paying medical bills and a note.  Then we couldn't pay rent.  We had to move in with friends in a different state, now we were both unemployed.  We went to food banks.  Eventually we couldn't burden her friend in good conscience and we moved 1k miles back down south to live with her family..but they're on a fixed income.  Then my family.   We were on foodstamps.  My brother loaned me his car.  I worked for minimum wage.  I couldn't pay my child support.  We'd lost everything we had between moves and sudden poverty. I was redeeming cds and I sold a gerber insurance policy that had been taken out when I was born just to stay above water and keep our kids clothed and fed.  I sold property at firesale prices in a climate where no one had the money to buy and values had already tanked.  The strain on our relationship is impossible to overstate.  My wife floated the idea of divorce, an incident that she still feels shame and cries about years later.  It took us years to dig our way back up and out of that hole...and it took the misery of others - I was constantly hovering over foreclosures.  We became the worst and most predatory versions of ourselves, lol.  I spent most of my time, even my free time, away from my family.  The good ole bad days, I supplemented our income with less than legal™ activities.  As you read all of the above, note that we started in a much more privileged place than the average pregnant couple.   We could afford to make those trips, we could afford elective testing, pt, we had investments, we owned real estate, we had friends with big houses, we had family with big hearts, we possessed marketable skills, the safety net in florida is impressive compared to other states...it's hard to find a real cracker in florida to arrest for failure to pay in mass, and all of my friends and peers were well off enough to be more the blow types than the rock types.  More dro than dirt.  Pills, not meth.

-and all for the birth of children.  Or, you know, warts and shit.  So..what I'm trying to say, is shut the fuck up, lol.

Like I said, a warzone is a place where human wellbeing is hardly a consideration. So the wellbeing of a fetus is not a priority. In a situation where hundreds of people might die brutally in a span of 30 seconds, what the hell does an abortion matter?

Trailer parks and projects aren't exactly places where human wellbeing is given pride of place, either.  Why abortion would matter on a battlefield, or in a trailer park, or in a project..is something you'd have to ask those people to ascertain, and you'll have to give it actual consideration..rather than address any of these things with the sole intention to dismiss them in the silliest of ways.

Abortions are not a moral good in a warzone.  War is hell. Morality kindly fucks off when we're in war.  It's purely tactics. This is why we developed rules of war - because historically it has been so unspeakably terrible.

The only morally good option when it comes to war is to refuse to participate. Because just think about it. What would happen if everyone did that?

If you say so, nevertheless, a lucid and compelling case can be made in spite of your lazy absolutism in either regard.

You started this by asking how an abortion could be morally justified.  Is that actually what you wanted?  

It's very often the case that an argument for both sides of any given coin, and many coins, exists - real world moral considerations are rarely binary.  It's okay for you to be on one side of one coin, it's entirely another thing for you to insist that the coin only has the one side and is the only coin.

Well thanks for all that... but when you wrap it up with a "So..what I'm trying to say, is shut the fuck up, lol" what I'm hearing is this:

"I have endured these things, and you haven't, so your argument is invalid."

Which is, of course, an ad hominem logical fallacy. My argument does not fail because of its content but because of who said it.

But that's just my interpretation of your argument. Hopefully your argument does not contain a fallacy and instead I've misinterpreted.

I'm sorry for the hardship you've endured, but I think your anecdote is tangential to the pro-choice movement. Pro-choice, ideally, is the notion that a woman could have a perfectly healthy baby and a guaranteed healthy pregnancy and a financially supple household and still be morally in the right to have an abortion. That is the ideal of pro-choice. That is the antithesis of what you're describing in your personal story.

[Lek]

Killing a human fetus is the same as removing a wart.  That's really disgusting.

[The Grand Nudger]

Well thanks for all that... but when you wrap it up with a "So..what I'm trying to say, is shut the fuck up, lol" what I'm hearing is this:

"I have endured these things, and you haven't, so your argument is invalid."

More to the effect of, "what you just said was phenomenally ignorant, and let me share a little bit to show you why. "

You didn't make an argument to be valid or invalid, you just said something stupid.  That, in your estimation, the people here would consider abortion on account of warts on a kids face.

So, I'll just state it again. Shut the fuck up, lol.

Which is, of course, an ad hominem logical fallacy. My argument does not fail because of its content but because of who said it.

But that's just my interpretation of your argument.  Hopefully your argument does not contain a fallacy and instead I've misinterpreted.

I'm sorry for the hardship you've endured, but I think your anecdote is tangential to the pro-choice movement.  Pro-choice, ideally, is the notion that a woman could have a perfectly healthy baby and a guaranteed healthy pregnancy and a financially supple household and still be morally in the right to have an abortion. That is the ideal of pro-choice. That is the antithesis of what you're describing in your personal story.

She could be.

I shared with you how two people who are ideologically opposed to abortion..my wife and myself.....have to confront the reality of the decision.  Had some other couple been in a similar situation and chose not to have the child it would be the height of hilarity if neither she nor I could understand if they decided they didn't want to deal with all of that.  To insist that, somehow, their decision which differed from ours was immoral, or could not be morally justified.

That story..was a story about my wife and I, two well off people with plenty of cash when we first went into it and wanting a child.... getting lucky.....let that sink in.  Things could have been even worse. We had to live through that, not just her and I..her and I and our kids and our friends and our family and everyone whose lives we impacted. It got ugly, and our daughter will spend the rest of her life dealing with that complication. Other people face worse consequences, more heartwrenching decisions, lesser circumstances....and, you know, some people don't even want kids, or aren't with anyone that they ought to have kids with. If you ask either of us, we'd do it all over again, and do it all over the same way again...but that's just us... it doesn't carry some weight we can place on another persons back or insist that they carry it or be bad people. Hell, we've heard every argument for why we were fucking up, why we shouldn't have a kid, or another kid, or another kid, or another kid. It's not that those people have been wholly wrong. More reasonable people in our situation might have called it quits after that first try and in many ways that probably could have been the best idea, practically and morally.

You asked for something, you got what you asked for. Your dissatisfaction is indicative of your own biases, and not in any way a product of not having been made aware of these things which you likely already knew..but decided to say phenomenally ignorant shit about. You asked me what I would advise a person, I'll advise you. Don't have an abortion, and while you're at it keep your opinions on the subject to yourself until such time as you can muster up credible ones.

Abortion problem solved.

[Nihilist Virus]

Oh, calm your tits. I'm not judging anyone. I went to great pains to say that I eat meat and I think it's morally wrong to do so.  So I'm not judging anyone. Abortion is immoral, but no one is being shamed or judged.

Maybe not intentionally.  You may very well have good intentions.  But as they say, the path to hell is paved with good intentions.  I've seen girls who are told that abortion is immoral, who've had to struggle with the decision.  Hell, I've been one of those girls.  When I got pregnant for the first time, I was reminded of how 'immoral' the decision of abortion was.  How it was 'killing my baby'. And despite being pro-choice at the time, because of that--I wasn't able to make the decision that was best for me at the time.  Because people kept reminding me how 'immoral' the choice was.  "Personally, I'd never have an abortion" they reminded me.  Nagging me (purposely or not) into not making the right decision.

So... is it not killing your baby then?

I'm not the person picketing and holding up a sign. I'm not judging and I wouldn't tell a woman who is having an abortion that what she's doing is immoral... unless she asked me my opinion. But none of that changes the fact that abortion is killing your baby. If you have the ability to wordsmith your way around that one, maybe you're able to solve the fundamental limitations of language and logic that have driven me to nihilism. Hell, maybe you also know of a workaround to thermodynamics which would allow for perpetual motion.

Or maybe you just don't like the brutally obvious and unavoidable fact that abortion is killing your baby and so you're lashing out.

Telling people "MEAT IS IMMORAL!" is way different than saying "ABORTION IS IMMORAL!"  There are millions and millions of meat eaters.  In fact, it's a minority of people that don't eat meat.  It's the difference between saying "Same Sex Marriage is Immoral" and "Traditional Marriage is Immoral".  One carries a stigma, the other doesn't.    There's no stigma for eating meat.  Nobody's going to go around and think "Oh my god, I'm a terrible person for making this decision to eat a delicious steak."  Most people don't even empathize with animals enough to give a shit.  But with abortion?  There's a HUGE fucking stigma to the whole thing.  One created by society, and propagated by those who find it 'immoral'.

I don't give half a shit about stigma. Meat and abortion are the same thing. It's the killing of a viable life form with a survival instinct and the capacity to suffer and feel pain so that others may benefit from it.