Abortion is Wrong

Thank you for this post. As someone who argued that scientifically life begins at conception (despite supporting the legal premise that abortion should be legal and unrestricted), I feel vindicated by your post. It seems to me that if something is living tissue and is a genetically unique organism, it's "alive" biologically. Sentient thought, and ability to stay alive without outside intervention, aren't part of the equation.

I've always found the definition of life that someone is not "alive" until it's no longer dependent on the mother pretty unpersuasive. After all, a two-week-old baby is entirely dependent on its mother for everything. It's utterly helpless. We're not like deer who are born able to walk on their own, eat on their own, and otherwise fend for themselves.
 
Contraception is not yet 100%.



Actually, no. The definition of life does include one thing which rules out a foetus - and actually extends further down the chain to puberty.

To be counted as a living organism, in standard biological definition, an organism must be capable of independent reproduction (i.e. viruses are not alive, as they require a host). As such a child then only becomes 'alive' when they've gone through puberty.



But technically accurate.



We also don't develop a sense of individual self identity until around two years old.
 
Life could begin at conception, two weeks later or 20 years later.
That is less important to me than suffering. If an organism can feel pain then we need to think very hard about ending its life and if we do end it we end it very quickly and as painlessly as possible.
Where possible an abortion should be done before suffering is a factor, which for me, means putting the cut off point well before the development of the nerve and neural pathways that register pain.
Someone with a better undertanding of embryology than me would have to pitch in when that stage is reached.
 
This is crazy sauce! Ant workers are alive but are all sterile. The definition of 'life' is not nearly so standardized.
 
My daughter's 4 and barely able to anything independently, let alone reproduction.
If the defintition of "life" or being "alive" doesn't include her then the the definition needs to change.
 
If you think about it, exactly 0 sexually reproducing organisms reproduce with true independence. Heck, even some parthenogenic geckos need a bit of the old in-out before they can lay fertile eggs. Then I wonder where certain parasites and parasitoids would fall in this classification scheme.
 
Yeah I mean...I need a woman to reproduce.
I've tried it without but, while fun, no children resulted.
 
It's just a dumb definition. It may apply on a species level, but that doesn't mean it applies to individuals.

Should we be holding funerals for women when they hit menopause?
 
Technical by whose standards? I have yet to read any biology textbook that says an organism is not alive until it reaches puberty. You're misapplying the definition.
 
No...I'm taking a strict interpretation of the definition, to highlight the point that you can pretty much interpret 'life' any way you want.

The definition states that reproduction is a requirement for life. Independent, as retroviruses are not counted (by the standard biological interpretation) as 'living'. Extending this to absurdity you can then draw the idea that nothing is alive until puberty, and that in fact any sexually reproducing organism is never actually 'alive' as you pointed out.

Of course that only matters if you take the view that this mysterious 'life' quality is intrinsically valuable.
 
Since I was deliberately aiming for reductio ad absurbum, there's no intellectual honestly. It's simply a way to highlight that there isn't an easy answer to when something is alive. So, life beginning at conception, or when identity starts to form, are the two extremes.

As it's so hard to define the moment that human life starts it isn't really useful in the abortion argument. If there were a clear answer (day 72 and seven ninths for example) then there would be no argument.

Since the moment 'life' begins is purely conceptual then, it is surely worth looking instead at other factors - which never really seems to happen on the pro-life side.
 
If the DNA starts changing at conception I would say that is now life. If we are searching other planets and find bacteria and shout, "This is life!" then I most certainly would consider something that is growing in its own unique way as "alive."

I think the problem with determining where things become alive comes from an emotional perspective on how important we think "life" is. I don't really share in the belief that all life must be protected or that it's important. Certain things alive are more important than others in my opinion and that goes all the way up to fully developed, adult human beings.

The world will move on regardless of where we determine "where life starts." I don't see how it's relevant. If anything I would think that if you have an abortion after an ample period of time where most would consider it acceptable, then you have shown a lack of personal responsibility and decision making. That of course can always get screwed up by others, but if it were I would call those influential people in that person's life douchecanoes.
 
From an abortion perspective I think the question is, when can this life be considered human?
 
I dont realy get why Christians are so anti abortion

Kids/babies go straight to heaven right?

Personally I believe the issue is more to do with men desiring to control women
 
I felt vindicated because I had been told previously by someone else that there is NO scientific basis to argue that life begins at conception and NO scientist would agree with that and that I clearly knew nothing about science, etc etc etc.
 
Not all of them are against it, as you probably know. Just the traditionally-minded Christian groups are against it. For them, it's a remarkably simple argument. I'm honestly surprised that you don't understand it. Abortion has consistently been considered wrong amongst Christians since at least the turn of the 1st century. Written evidence of it's prohibition begins with the Didache. The rationale for declaring it wrong is that murder is wrong. Abortion stills a beating heart, blah blah blah, and it sure ain't a giraffe. You're killing a child who hasn't done anything wrong himself, and whom you wouldn't kill in a few months time when he's sitting across the room from you. It's a murder of convenience. From their perspective it has absolutely nothing to do with controlling women. It is entirely an issue of murder.
 
I'd have to disagree with you there. It's often framed by feminists as an issue of male dominance over women, but I firmly believe that anti-abortionists see it entirely as being a moral matter over when/whether it's justifiable to end a human life.
 
I apologize if you felt that was my intention in my initial response. It wasn't. I think you've consistently demonstrated yourself to be abnormally informed and intelligent on these forums and are quite capable of understanding the science just as well as I am.

The following are virtually indisputable scientific facts though:Science doesn't know the precise moment in development when an organism suddenly springs to "life."Science certainly doesn't know the moment that personhood develops in humans.
Those are not even scientific questions. Scientists naturally have opinions on these topics, like everyone else. They are merely their personal opinions on ethics though. Are there scientists and doctors who will misrepresent their personal opinions as scientific facts on this and any other topic you can think of? Yup. That doesn't make those opinions science. Science is not words that happen to come out of a scientists mouth.

The reason I felt so strongly about making this distinction as clear as possible to everyone discussing this topic is because I believe really bad things frequently happen when people politicize scientific data inaccurately to promote their personal agendas. I'm confident that was never your conscious intention and you were just repeating common misleading information as it had been presented to you.

Again, I really hope you don't feel attacked about all of this. That was never my intention. I'm not trying to change your personal opinion about when you feel life begins here. I'm asking you to be sensitive to the point that scientists don't know the correct answer either, no matter what they may tell you, and to please be aware of what effect accidentally making an academically dishonest statement can have on others.
 
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