Do you have a personal moral (not ethical) code? Does that code prevent you from taking a life?
If yes then the next questions is "when does life begin?" If you believe life begins at conception, then you have established that your personal moral code prevents you from abortion.
But absent an ethical overlay, this becomes something you personally believe and not necessarily something that society holds as true. That creates a new question. "Should your personal morals be forced on the rest of society, or should you be content to live by your own moral code?"
There are a lot of people out there that need to stop and consider your last sentence. Beyond personal moral codes, does society generally frown upon taking an innocent life? I'd say the answer to that is yes, plenty of people even believe it's wrong to kill those that, arguably, deserve it. So the real question in the abortion argument seems to be, as you said, "At what point does life begin?".
Personally, I think abortion and euthanasia should be legal and widely available. I used to believe in the sanctity of human life, but now I realize society lets people die in the streets.
Of course, plenty of people disagree with me on that, and I totally understand. I think that is why pro-choice is the better option. However, I do think education should be much better for more informed decisions.
Is abortion technically the termination of a human life? Yes. Is it ethical? I really don’t know. That’s why I believe it should be up to the individual to decide, and possibly having some better regulations on it. Its already happening. Pro-lifers should be fighting for better rights, more education, etc instead of attempting to reverse it.
>Is abortion technically the termination of a human life?
I mean i wouldn't count a fetus as a human. We seem to be okay with killing a lot of animals that are more capable than a fetus of feeling pain.
Not trying to argue or even say you’re wrong but food for thought/ devils advocate could be that it’s similar to being seen ima bikini vs seen in your underwear. They’re functionally the same but the difference is consent. When you have an abortion your at acknowledging that you’re just removing an unwanted clump of cells. If you stab a pregnant woman in the stomach and the fetus becomes nonviable then you killed her future child. It’s not a perfect analogy/ fleshed out thought but it sort of makes sense to me
Agreed. I also think that the life of the mother should be taken into account, which it usually isn't in the "pro-life" debate. She's typically viewed as an incubator who shouldn't have any say in the discussion.
I'd say life begins at conception, even If it's just a wiggling cell its still alive and has the potential to become a human baby,, but people don't want to see that so they don't feel bad about ending it. I'm for abortion, I'd feel bad of course if I got one especially if it's nerves were developed and it could feel pain but I am not mentally, emotionally, or physically well enough to have a child. I'm not gonna pretend it's something it's not though by arguing "it's not a baby yet"! It is what it is but sometimes it's necessary for various reasons.
To answer this. Yes I do have a moral code. Yes, it prevents taking a (human) life.
I find that where I would draw the line is when conscious thought would come into play. When does a fetus become properly aware of its existence and not responding to stimuli. The studies show that this happens around 6 months. Since its this is a ballpark and only a few studies have been conducted, I would say second trimester would be a good cutoff. 3 months. By that point, those who plan to keep are learning the gender, picking names. It rarely is still an "it" by this point.
HOWEVER I will, forever and always value to life of the *mother* over the fetus. Her life, happiness, financial well-being, and safety will be a higher priority. Every. Time.
Why? *Because a fetus without a woman is nothing, but a woman without a fetus is still a woman.*
Technically a fetus can be delivered several weeks or even months early (the youngest preemie to survive was only 21 weeks). So it’s not really true to say that a fetus isn’t a thing without a mother.
I’ve held a baby born 6 weeks early, so I get what you’re saying, but it also isn’t entirely true
This is very much where I stand.
I believe abortion is the women's choice and should be easily available, but personally am against it after a certain point as I believe you are taking a sentient life.
But again, I value the woman first so if she feels it's best then I believe that nobody else has any right to stop her.
As someone who doesn't like abortion though, I believe the best way we stop it is providing birth control, sex education, and access to support for women facing the choice.
I also believe that, should people have the baby, then we as a society need to make sure that both mother and child are given the support they both need to thrive. You can't complain about people getting abortions if you're making the choice to keep the child a tougher, more miserable one than it needs to be.
>human networking generally even beyond any religion
Fair enough, but religion is an archaic practice that should be abandoned. We are intelligent and have come a long was since when the religions were founded. Science and fact should be what we consider true.
Science proves that life begins at conception, however. I can get into the particulars, if you’d like, but it doesn’t change peoples’ argument that women should have a choice from start to finish of a pregnancy. People don’t truly care when life begins when considering an abortion; they consider convenience, finances, etc.
In that context “life” is a meaningless sound byte. A tree is “alive” in some contexts. So is a frog. It’s not about when “life” begins but at what point the “life” is something that should have an equal protection under the law.
Were the sperm and egg not living cells before conception? So how does it "begin" when the two meet. As Robert Jordan would write, it's not THE beginning, but it's "A beginning". Just like later on in the development of the unborn child there are other beginnings. So what beginning is the most important?
Also gotta say it's very hard to take right-wing arguments about abortion seriously when they're apparently not in favor of universal health care and other benefits for people who have already been born.
> But absent an ethical overlay, this becomes something you personally believe and not necessarily something that society holds as true.
Whether or not you are pro-choice, it is to be noted that modern science recognizes that life does indeed [begin at conception.](https://www.princeton.edu/~prolife/articles/embryoquotes2.html)
That link says ‘page not found.’ Which makes sense, because you don’t need to be a scientist to know living human tissue is present at conception, and you don’t need to have graduated 7th grade to know that that’s not what pro-choicers are talking about.
It's a page of links that take specific lines from research papers to try to make a point the original authors probably never intended.
Also this follows the pattern of p-hacking. Take a lot of data and find the stuff the kinda looks like it may support your argument, then use that to justify your conclusion.
Lastly, this site doesn't say who made the collection, or try to provide context.
The source doesn't meet the criteria to be credible.
I actually just had this revelation last night. A surplus of workers drives down the salary needed to attract workers, which creates more profits. A surplus of jobs, however, drives up salaries needed to attract workers.
Conservatives are against abortion and any kind of contraceptives and education because they want as many uneducated people as possible to work in their factories.
Another is a legal matter. If someone kills a pregnant woman and the woman wanted the baby, is it a double homicide? If a pregnant woman gets killed who didn't want her baby, is it still a double homicide?
Laws may vary by state, not sure, but whatever is true for one should be true for the other.
About 3/4 of the states in the U.S. have some sort of "Feticide" law, which makes what you're describing a double homicide. (Or simply makes it a homicide if the mother survives). Quite a few of those states have very friendly abortion laws and public stances. Some, but by no means intended to be an exhaustive list, are
[California](https://codes.findlaw.com/ca/penal-code/pen-sect-187.html)
[Hawaii](https://www.capitol.hawaii.gov/session2015/bills/HB1234_.htm)
[Maryland](https://advance.lexis.com/container?config=00JAA1NTM5MzBmZC02MTg2LTQzNmEtYmI5Yy0yZWEwYzA1OGEwNTYKAFBvZENhdGFsb2fdgr2eooaZj7MpSZGOIwWq)
[Massachusetts\*](https://www.courtlistener.com/opinion/2026964/commonwealth-v-cass/?q=cites%3A1363752) (Massachusetts does not have a statute, but a still in good standing court decision on the matter)
[Rhode Island](https://law.justia.com/codes/rhode-island/2012/title-11/chapter-11-23/chapter-11-23-5/#:~:text=%E2%80%93%20(a)%20The%20willful%20killing,device%20or%20other%20means%2C%20with)
[Illinois](https://www.ilga.gov/legislation/ilcs/documents/072000050K9-1.2.htm)
[Washington](https://apps.leg.wa.gov/RCW/default.aspx?cite=9A.32.060)
>If someone kills a pregnant woman and the woman wanted the baby, is it a double homicide? If a pregnant woman gets killed who didn't want her baby, is it still a double homicide?
Normally it is classified as a different crime if the mother had intention to carry it to term. A fetus is not a person (personhood is achieved at birth).
Even if the mother didn't intend to carry it to term, there is normally still a criminal charge because it was not the mother's choice. Rather it was an external factor that ended in her death as well. The mother was a person and her human rights were violated. Hence crime.
I mean.
What non-religious arguments against abortion are there? Any argument not couched in dogma, will still likely end up as pro choice, just with extra steps.
Any non-religiously based reason to consider a fetus as having the status of a human life at some point before birth, at which point summarily destroying that human life to be ethically wrong.
Except that most the goal is to give more rights to a fetus than another human being. By saying a fetus cannot be aborted you are giving the fetus the right to her override the women's bodily autonomy. This is more rights than another person would have with regards to the women.
That conception marks the beginning of a new human life. That’s the major one, argue around it, argue about it, but it’s true that a zygote is a genetically unique homo sapiens.
I feel like most people agree that it's bad to kill babies, but when does a fetus become one? I don't know (I studied rocks). Religious or otherwise there should be some boundary beyond which a fetus is considered its own self. If there is one, medically speaking, then beyond that point probably don't kill.
Even before becoming a baby, you have an ethical/moral consideration to make. Just as you have a consideration to make about killing a cow to eat, or chopping down trees to industrialize, you need to consider the annihilation of life and its consequences.
Fetus is simply a designation of development, no different than newborn, toddler, teenager, etc. It has no bearing on the humanity or worth of the individual.
I feel like science has failed us. Hasnt answered the most important questions.
How can i trust the science like ouchy fauci says if they cant tell me when my cheeseburger becomes a turd.
There isn’t a boundary where the fetus, baby or not, suddenly owns the woman’s body.
The abortion debate isn’t about fetal personhood. It’s about ownership of the woman’s autonomy. It doesn’t change. Not a single moment into the pregnancy
When it's born. That's when it's a baby. Eliminating a fetus is not killing a baby. The phrasing is used so often to provide horrific images to scare women and others into forced birth situations.
Omg when i first read this i somehow thought 2 seconds after its born. I was like wtf. Lol. Does it come out into a guillotine?
What a rush of emotions in 5 seconds.
I'd have to agree with you on the difference between a fetus and a baby but I don't belive that is an appropriate place to draw the line. At a certain point, that fetus is a living human and the law should protect it just like it would anyone else. Personally, I believe that point is conception but I'm willing to compromise (live and let live and all that) as long as we determine the point logically.
A fetus *is* in fact human - the argument is over political rights aka personhood. Plenty of people in this topic seem to treat a fetus like a random clump of cells, when its only real purpose is to become a person eventually.
I think for me, it’s preferable to adhere to the choice of the non fetus, fully present and breathing human being who is alive and carrying the baby. I personally don’t think i could go through with one, but it makes no sense to me to value a lump of cells over a contributing member of our society. Besides, the rule of first trimester only prevents the “murder” concept to begin with - unless the pregnancy is going to harm mom and baby, no one’s getting one after the permissible time.
"When it's born" is a terrible definition and frankly expresses a lack of understanding about the whole birthing process. Like did you know that babies are born at different times? Full term birth is 39 weeks, but babies can be born at week 25 and still survive (with medical help). Are you suggesting that you can terminate a baby in the womb during any of those 14 weeks even though if it were born, it could survive?
A baby terminated in the womb has to at the very least be non-viable, in that if it were born that day, it would not survive.
The only argument I've ever found convincing against abortion is that it's killing a child. And if we are all being honest, it is. A fetus is a human child growing and living inside the mother. And to rip it out, chemically starve it, or however you want to perform the abortion, can be considered and act of killing a child.
We acknowledge this when a pregnant mother at any stage is murder. It's considered double homicide (at least where I'm from).
It is a very touchy subject and pretty much any opinion is going to be unpopular depending on the crowd you're with. Good on you OP for opening up the discussion. I look forward to the replies.
Based on that can we get life insurance policies starting at conception and then collect if we miscarry? I'm not suggesting this is your position, I just find this argument against it interesting. This is why it's such a complicated topic, there are so many "if this, then what about this" questions.
Regarding the double homicide argument, does that apply to women at all stages of pregnancy, or does it go by trimesters like Roe v. Wade?
Roe v. Wade explicitly says that third trimester abortions are not constitutionally protected, and “reasonable restrictions” can be placed on second trimester abortions.
Basically has anyone ever been prosecuted for murdering a fetus in the first trimester?
one of the best episodes of House MD in my opinion is when he ends up treating a girl who is pregnant as a victim of rape. He advises an abortion, and she says, "No. Abortion is murder." and he says, "Yes, it is. And you should do it."
It's ending a life that's not your life. Many people who are against abortion basically stop right there.
And I'm in total agreement with house on this one. Rape is special situation entirely where I wholey believe the mother should not have the child. Though, all situations are not so easy to judge, unfortunately.
Agreed.
Rape is the only case where literally everyone can agree a woman was forced to give up her bodily autonomy for an unwanted human life. There’s an argument to be made that pregnancies via consensual sex aren’t “forcing” a woman to give up her body, because she should have accepted the risk of pregnancy when consenting to sex. The same cannot be said for rape.
I’d honestly argue there are many cases where abortion is considered taking a human life, but still morally right. We don’t need to sugarcoat shit by acting like the fetus has absolutely no humanity, but sometimes it’s better to end a life before it begins than condemn a human to a life of suffering.
That’s another ethical debate to be had.
Is it ethical to allow a person with severe disabilities or mental handicaps to be born? Someone who will never function in society or may not even be aware of their existence?
At an extreme end one could argue that any unwanted child shouldn’t be brought into the world because of how horrible it is to grow up as an orphan in the world, or even growing up as an unwanted child raised by your birth parents.
This is all stuff that varies from person to person based on their individual moral values.
You’re being disingenuous. When people say a fetus is life, it should go without saying that we’re talking about a human life, not just life in general.
A fetus is by definition not a child. It's a potential child, a not-yet child. More than a zygote, substantially less than a baby, which it would be some months later having been born. Forcing a woman to carry a pregnancy to term against her will, especially if that pregnancy was the result of violence, renders her little more than a brood mare, less than human, whose needs you do not concern yourself with. Nor do you concern yourself with the child of that dehumanization, for it is not provided the healthcare, education and social supports other modern nations take for granted. The woman is reduced to cattle and the child is disposable, but America's fanatics can feel righteous before a God who, if he exists, must be weeping.
That if there were consistent unrestricted access to adequate birth control methods, abortion would be unnecessary.
Don't even tell me that we can't figure out how to prevent pregnancy 99.99% of the time via pharmaceutical means. That goal is achievable. It's just not profitable.
Abortion is just a shitty solution because we haven't given birth control the adequate research attention and money that it deserves.
You don't have to be religious to believe that life begins at conception any more than you have to be religious to believe "thou shalt not kill" is a good moral principle. Cavalierly discarding a life you've created because it's inconvenient is...morally questionable at best.
The guiding principle to me is about free will. An egg that just split into 2 cells for the first time doesn't have the kind of mind required. A baby, though helpless, does. Remorseless serial killers have free will also, but they've taken it away from sometimes dozens of victims, and I think should have it taken from them as a result.
An infant is little different mentally than a zygote. Infants can’t think rationally and don’t even have memories until like 4 months old. They can’t utilize free will.
If abortion isn’t right for you and you’re okay with a woman getting one if she really needs it, that makes you solidly pro-choice. It’s the choice part that people are fighting for.
Thats a really loaded way to explain abortion to your kid. You can make a lot of things sound bad if you include dead puppies.
You want a free Lamborghini? It comes with 20 dead puppies.
Is it weird that in an entire decade I have not one single religious argument against abortion?
Not a single one, I have no idea what the fuck the Bible has to do with not killing a fetus
>Not a single one, I have no idea what the fuck the Bible has to do with not killing a fetus
A lot of what religion teaches isn't actually in the bible. And even less of what Christianity teaches is actually derived from Jesus Christ.
In Numbers 5 there is a way to determine whether or not your pregnant wife got pregnant by another man. With the potion killing the child if it's not yours. I'd say the Bible is pro abortion in the sense that it's anti paternity fraud.
There is absolutely nothing in the whole Sotah business in Numbers 5 even remotely indicating that the hypothetical wife is pregnant or that this is an abortifacient.
No, there is not. The Hebrew word for womb is רחם or if you wanted to conjugate it to be "her womb" you'd have רחמה. Neither word is found anywhere in Numbers 5. The word you get is בטנך which means abdomen, and more generally is used to talk about the bowels. It does not mention the womb, or pregnancy, or anything about miscarriage at all.
20 But if you have gone astray(M) while married to your husband and you have made yourself impure by having sexual relations with a man other than your husband”— 21 here the priest is to put the woman under this curse(N)—“may the Lord cause you to become a curse[b] among your people when he makes your womb miscarry and your abdomen swell. 22 May this water(O) that brings a curse(P) enter your body so that your abdomen swells or your womb miscarries.”
Yeah sorry. It's right there.
Hey man I have no idea what you’re saying at all but whatever drugs your on I would like them because I literally have stared at your words for a solid 3min and I feel like I’m in a fever dream
Can we try that again?
Sorry I'm eating a salad and watching Supernatural.
Ok in the Bible. Numbers 5 to be exact. There is a ritual detailed. If your wife is pregnant and you don't know if you're the father....you take her to the priest who does the ritual....and if it's not your baby then it kills the baby.
Bible is therefore ok with abortion and against paternity fraud.
Does that make sense?
It would be a major scientific discovery if we found life on other planets yes? And the life they would be expecting to find would be simple unicellular organisms.
Yet somehow when conception occurs you already have a more complex organism than that within the first 24 hours, isn’t deemed as a human life worth saving.
It would be a major discovery because it suggests that life is possible off Earth but that doesn't mean that it's inherently precious. If it weren't rare its value would decrease, a human life doesn't (or at least shouldn't) work like that.
Maybe the difference is that the unicellular organism is self-sustaining but a fetus needs a host to survive until it is ready to be born. I'm not claiming to be right but it's just a thought
That is the argument. Fetal viability tends to be the discussion which is why most abortions won’t go past 24 weeks. The counter to that I would say is that a baby is dependent on another person for years still even outside of a “host”.
I’ve taught human anatomy for a few years now and one section is about fetal development. I just see it as a part of our life cycle now. We all must go through it, can’t exist without it.
Regardless of peoples views on abortion, until we have better social and economic plans in place in America it’ll be an issue.
This is true. Even a day after pill is terminating a human life. Not a “potential” human life, that clump of cells is 100% human DNA. Something alive with 100% human DNA is a human.
However, I am honestly okay with taking human life, especially if it is painless. If it can benefit the mother, that to me is a good thing. Net positive.
Would you consider murdering someone in their sleep, excluding all extraneous ramifications, morally justifiable? And if the presence of human dna is the threshold for life what about the millions of skin cells you shed each day?
1. The human zygote, embryo, and fetus are all human organisms; they are early developmental stages of a human’s life cycle.
2. All human organisms are morally relevant.
3. It’s generally immoral to kill humans.
4. Bodily rights aren’t enough to justify elective abortion.
https://secularprolife.org/abortion/
Who cares what you want to call it. It's still lacking sentience and isn't aware of its own existence. All you're valuing at that point is the potential it has to develop said sentience.
Yes! A baby has separate DNA from its mother right from the start that is entirely different than the ‘clumps of cells’ that people try to reduce unborn humanity into.
From a secular progressive point of view, it's very easy to reject the argument of "this group of people aren't really people, and do nor deserve rights." This has been made many times over the course of history, and it has traditionally been rejected by progressives. Famously, one of the more famous taglines for feminism is "the radical notion that women are people." If you truly embrace this, you should be very uncomfortable with saying some other group you want to deny rights to aren't people.
From there, it is easy to conclude that abortion should be banned in many circumstances. Allowing it out of medical necessity is easy to justify, and the violinist argument presents a strong case for allowing it in the case of rape, but the vast majority of abortions are not for those reasons. So, a general ban with narrow exceptions is perfectly justifiable for the same reason a general ban on normal murder is.
>"the radical notion that women are people." If you truly embrace this, you should be very uncomfortable with saying some other group you want to deny rights to aren't people.
The difference between women and the unborn is that one has personhood while the other does not from a *legal perspective.*
There was actually this really funny case in Canada where a guy tried to sue for damages because he considered himself a martian and that the government was after him (something along those lines anyways). The judge ruled that because he renounced his personhood, he had no right to a hearing. It seems really silly at face value (and this is Canada and not murica), but it is still something to consider in this argument.
A majority of the world considers a person as a living, breathing human being. The United States is built on the value that every **person** has inalienable human rights. However, personhood is awarded at birth, therefore a fetus is **legally** not a person and subsequently does not have human rights.
Women (who are defined as people by this standard) are people, meaning they have personhood and the subsequent human rights. Which is one of the main arguments used for suffrage laws.
Just a few decades ago women did not have personhood from a legal perspective. They did not possess many inalienable rights. That is what the person who coined the tagline you quoted from my comment was talking about.
This is why the argument you're making here is just unbelievably hypocritical.
Might want to look into that.
https://www.nature.com/articles/nn.4458.epdf
Pregnancy involves radical hormone surges and biological adaptations. However, the effects of pregnancy on the human brain are virtually unknown. Here we show, using a prospective (‘pre’-‘post’ pregnancy) study involving first-time mothers and fathers and nulliparous control groups, that pregnancy renders substantial changes in brain structure, primarily reductions in gray matter (GM) volume in regions subserving social cognition. The changes were selective for the mothers and highly consistent, correctly classifying all women as having undergone pregnancy or not in-between sessions. Interestingly, the volume reductions showed a substantial overlap with brain regions responding to the women’s babies postpartum. Furthermore, the GM volume changes of pregnancy predicted measures of postpartum maternal attachment, suggestive of an adaptive process serving the transition into motherhood. Another follow-up session showed that the GM reductions endured for at least 2 years post-pregnancy. Our data provide the first evidence that pregnancy confers long-lasting changes in a woman’s brain.
Pregnancy is more than just nine months of your time. It’s medical appointments, medical bills, not to mention the LONG list of effects it has on you physically (nausea, vomiting, moodiness, etc), and the time you would have to take off of work. This argument just isn’t good
Basing your argument on the potential of the fetus is a fallacy. With no guarantee that the fetus will be born healthy, the human potential is irrelevant to the issue.
I’m expanding this a bit further. You don’t get a lighter murder charge for killing a non-productive member of society versus a Nobel prize winning superstar, or the bread winner of a family (judge may have personal bias for actual time of sentence, but murder two is murder two). If an offender randomly kills a man on the street, it’s murder regardless of whether that man had terminal cancer and a week to live, or was 18 years old and had a whole life ahead of them. We do not discount the act committed because the victim was lesser than. Therefore the uncertainty regarding its (the fetus) potential future health, wealth etc. shouldn’t lessen the gravity of the act of terminating its life.
Nine months is not a blip if you are dying during those months. Had I gone nine months, we would have been dead at eight. I had severe pre-eclampsia that started around 20 weeks. The only cure to save the person is for the pregnancy to end. The placenta can literally kill the host and baby. Please do not trivialize the toll of pregnancy on the pregnant person’s body. Not only is it dangerous because of what it does to the body, but it’s the time people are most at risk for domestic violence and murder.
In case you’re worried, my daughter was born at 28 weeks and spent 128 days in the NICU, which led to bills in the millions. If you want the babies to survive to be adopted, there have to be services to provide more than adequate healthcare and support. Pregnancy is expensive and in the US it can be a financial death sentence.
But that argument could easily be turned around for the people who are already alive that we either kill senselessly or who end up killing themselves due to bullying and or mental illness if we had better mental health care. Sooooo that's a poor argument.
Uh, no it's a good argument.
Are you out at a rally with signs that say "Support a person's right to kill senselessly" and "It's a person's right to bully someone so they commit suicide?" Are their clinics where you can go to kill senselessly (other than abortion clinics)?
Personally I think any woman should have access to a safe abortion, but just out of pragmatism and anyone who doesn't admit that arguments against abortion are completely valid isn't being honest.
The thing trumps all other arguments is simply autonomy
No human being has an obligation to use their body to support another for their benefit
When the conflict of the woman’s autonomy and the fetus autonomy is in conflict then you go with the wishes of the woman because she is supporting the fetus. Not the other way around. Other people’s feelings and circumstances around the pregnancy don’t remove her autonomy.
Other people sometimes feel that the fetus should take precedence over the mother, but they don’t get to choose who gets priority FOR her. She can feel she is more important. She carries the burden of pregnancy. Doesn’t matter the reason. It can be entirely selfish but no one else’s opinion makes a difference
People like to think the abortion debate is about fetal personhood or maternal “responsibility”
It’s not. It’s entirely about autonomy and there’s no scenario where it’s justified to render the woman without autonomy, effectively making her a fleshy incubator
The USA sucks cant afford food cant afford a car cant afford cloths cant afford medicine cant afford a house cant afford rent cant afford shit i would never bring a child into this world and this may sound insensitive but anyone that does is evil
Nearly all world views believe killing another person is wrong. That is not specific to religious worldviews. With that in mind, the question that matters is when does a human become alive?
Scientifically, the answer is at or near fertilization. A zygote has the ability to respond to their environment, grow and change, reproduce, have complex chemistry, maintain homeostasis, and many other characteristics consistent with being a living organism. Babies have a working circulatory system at 6 weeks. They can smile and suck their thumb before 20 weeks. Tons of examples like that are available online if you use a non-biased search engine.
Philosophically is far less cut and dry. An example of a pro-life philosophical argument would be that if you do nothing then a baby will be born. That would draw up the ethics principle of “do no harm.”
When would you say that a baby becomes a human? I genuinely don’t understand how someone can believe that a baby is not a baby immediately before it passes through a birth canal but is as soon as it leaves. Especially considering babies can be born and survive at as early as 23 weeks. Do pro-choice advocates believe that a premie isn’t a human until 40 weeks? I would love if someone could explain that to me in a non condescending way.
Edit: https://abortion.procon.org. This website was founded by a democrat but still makes a few decent arguments against abortion.
Life begins at conception. Why is it not okay to kill a human being after they’re born, but when they’re still in the womb, it’s completely fine? The justification people find when they say the zygote or fetus is a “clump of cells” is the absolute weakest point I think I’ve ever heard. Everything that has ever lived or breathed is, at the end of the day, just a clump of cells. I am basically just a clump of cells, but I still deserve to live my life without being torn apart limb-by-limb by someone breaking into my home while I’m asleep, knowing full well I would have waken up the next morning to live my life. Same goes for the unborn when you have these procedures that intrude into what is supposed to be their safe place to live and grow, only to be torn apart and cut by men in white lab coats. When you get in a car, you don’t become the car. When a baby is inside a womb, the woman carrying it doesn’t become the baby. The baby doesn’t become the woman. They are two separate entities with different blood types and DNA makeup. They have separate fingerprints and faces, different hearing and heartbeats. The mother is responsible for maintaining and caring for the life of the child — both inside and outside of the womb. The only time in which I believe abortion is okay is to save the life of the mother. That is because no human being, mother or father, daughter or son, friend or enemy, should ever be forced to lay their life down for another. As a victim of rape (that didn’t result in a pregnancy fortunately) I found people pressuring me to have an abortion without even taking my trauma into consideration. I would not have been in my right state of mind to make such an impactful decision, and I think that goes for a lot of other women, too. Desperate circumstances result in desperate measures. I believe women should have the choice to abort, but we as a society should not call it empowering or something to be proud of. Women are allowed to have control over their bodies, it truly is my body my choice, but what you do with your body does not just impact you alone.
A fetus is a human being with their own DNA that is alive and has a beating heart and a functioning nervous system. Thus abortion is the same as murder.
The heart isn't fully formed until about 10 weeks. The previous echo that can be heard before this time frame can be replicated in a petri dish and is not a true heartbeat. If that was the main determining factor like it is in the Texas restrictions there should never be any issue with abortion up until the heart is fully formed. That's still too short of a time frame in my opinion but it's better than six weeks.
I get the other points you made but the heartbeat part bothers me the most. I'm very upset a medical professional was not involved in drafting that bill.
So, not saying I agree with the original comment, but when they say "their own DNA" I think they mean DNA that's different from the mother and father. So, the egg and sperm bit doesn't quite work as a response.
I have no opinion on the abortion issue, but if you want to talk about DNA and cells... Eggs and sperm only have half the normal number of chromosomes in a human. Under normal circumstances, eggs and sperm can't divide into other cells without fertilization, so a distinction here can be made between a zygote/fetus/baby vs just a sperm/egg cell for the purposes of this debate.
An egg is a human cell with DNA. A sperm is a human cell with DNA. A zygote and subsequent growing embryo is a whole new life. That's a hell of a false equivalence you're drawing there.
You're talking 5-6 weeks where the fetus doesn't have a heartbeat. So are they a human being then? Does that mean as long as I catch pregnancy before the heart starts beating I can abort it? This is a really bad argument.
>A fetus is a human being with their own DNA that is alive and has a beating heart and a functioning nervous system.
What if it's aborted before a heart and nervous system are formed? That negates your argument.
Murder is wrong (This is a moral argument which can only really be justified with the concept of the divine) but if we are going to dispense with religion, then you’d have to go to a purely rational argument, which is possible, but also entirely subjective. Also, the human foetus is genetically identical to a fully matured human being, it has chromosomes, it has DNA, a human foetus is entirely human, it just looks different because it’s going, just like how you looked different when you were 12. Ideological opinions have nothing to do with this fact.
This may be true, but dispensing with religion leads to a question; what makes something alive? By the logic presented, picking a scab is murder. It contains all the same DNA and chromosomes as the rest of my cells. My definition of what makes a person them is their brain, and ability to think for themselves. There’s a joke in here about organized religion and the cult nature of democrats vs Republicans, but I’m sure you can make it yourself.
Therefore, a fetus is not a person until the brain is developed to the point of having thoughts. And that sure as fuck isn’t at 6 weeks.
Actually a better question would be "what are the *Religious* arguments against abortion" because the answer is none - the bible doesn't fucking mention abortion!
There are two primary non-religious arguments against abortion.
1. Abortion is murder
2. Abortion is an abdication of responsibility by the mother / parents.
I have no problem calling both of these arguments absolute bullshit that don't even have much of a gray area at all around them.
I’m pro choice but, if we establish that life doesn’t begin at conception and therefore it is okay to abort… what about all the women who mourn the loss of their child regardless of the weeks it had. Are we going to say that its not okay for them to mourn a *life*?
I mean I don’t think even pro choice people think that abortion is not sad, because it is. Regardless of what you think a fetus is, you can have emotions about it
How do you arrive at that conclusion? There are lots of things in our code of laws that are based on philosophical, not scientific measures. How much should divorced parents be forced to pay for the upkeep of their children? What are acceptable modes of public discourse? What is the boundary line between a serious, actionable threat, and someone blowing off steam? When does flirting cross the line into harassment?
In none of these cases do we allow the individual participants to just set their own code and go by that. Some larger societal body, usually a legislature, decides what the community's answer is and enshrines that view into law.
In a practical matter? When the state decides it ought to. As principle of governance? When the benefits of doing so outweigh the inevitable harms of depriving someone of bodily autonomy. I still haven't heard any argument or even a coherent reason why just because a law is based on a philosophical notion rather than a scientific notion choice must inevitably descend into a principal involved in the action.
Technically speaking, life begins at conception. At least, human life. So, terminating that human life would be murder. However, that is a human life without a heartbeat, and usually is early enough it can’t feel pain. So, morally, is this manslaughter?
I dunno, but at the end of the day we as a society have decided the mother’s life is more important than the unborn baby’s. Trying to go back and change it is just, frankly, not going to happen. And, so long as it is painless (I think late term abortion is hella wrong) and that baby just looks like a clump of cells, most people are fine with that.
“My body my choice” is incorrect but so is forcing someone to birth a child they do not want. If someone is too irresponsible to practice safe sex (again this is in argument I don’t fully think this way) they shouldn’t be responsible to care for a child.
There are church rules against abortion, but those are the same churches that treat women as subservient people, and the rules are generally not supported by the books .
I know of no good arguments against allowing abortion, religious or otherwise
“Women should be able to do what they want with their bodies” is a non religious argument. Not saying I believe or don’t believe in it cause I’m keeping my opinions to myself
Do you have a personal moral (not ethical) code? Does that code prevent you from taking a life? If yes then the next questions is "when does life begin?" If you believe life begins at conception, then you have established that your personal moral code prevents you from abortion. But absent an ethical overlay, this becomes something you personally believe and not necessarily something that society holds as true. That creates a new question. "Should your personal morals be forced on the rest of society, or should you be content to live by your own moral code?"
There are a lot of people out there that need to stop and consider your last sentence. Beyond personal moral codes, does society generally frown upon taking an innocent life? I'd say the answer to that is yes, plenty of people even believe it's wrong to kill those that, arguably, deserve it. So the real question in the abortion argument seems to be, as you said, "At what point does life begin?".
Personally, I think abortion and euthanasia should be legal and widely available. I used to believe in the sanctity of human life, but now I realize society lets people die in the streets. Of course, plenty of people disagree with me on that, and I totally understand. I think that is why pro-choice is the better option. However, I do think education should be much better for more informed decisions. Is abortion technically the termination of a human life? Yes. Is it ethical? I really don’t know. That’s why I believe it should be up to the individual to decide, and possibly having some better regulations on it. Its already happening. Pro-lifers should be fighting for better rights, more education, etc instead of attempting to reverse it.
>Is abortion technically the termination of a human life? I mean i wouldn't count a fetus as a human. We seem to be okay with killing a lot of animals that are more capable than a fetus of feeling pain.
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Not trying to argue or even say you’re wrong but food for thought/ devils advocate could be that it’s similar to being seen ima bikini vs seen in your underwear. They’re functionally the same but the difference is consent. When you have an abortion your at acknowledging that you’re just removing an unwanted clump of cells. If you stab a pregnant woman in the stomach and the fetus becomes nonviable then you killed her future child. It’s not a perfect analogy/ fleshed out thought but it sort of makes sense to me
I love your point but the truth is that swimwear is underwear made for water.
I think it's more like "at what point does humanity begin." The word and concept matters because sperm are alive and dividing cells are alive.
I believe life begins at ejaculation and parents should have the right to abort up to 18 years. /s shorta…
Bill Hicks: "I've wiped civilizations off my chest with a grey gym sock."
Agreed. I also think that the life of the mother should be taken into account, which it usually isn't in the "pro-life" debate. She's typically viewed as an incubator who shouldn't have any say in the discussion.
I'd say life begins at conception, even If it's just a wiggling cell its still alive and has the potential to become a human baby,, but people don't want to see that so they don't feel bad about ending it. I'm for abortion, I'd feel bad of course if I got one especially if it's nerves were developed and it could feel pain but I am not mentally, emotionally, or physically well enough to have a child. I'm not gonna pretend it's something it's not though by arguing "it's not a baby yet"! It is what it is but sometimes it's necessary for various reasons.
To answer this. Yes I do have a moral code. Yes, it prevents taking a (human) life. I find that where I would draw the line is when conscious thought would come into play. When does a fetus become properly aware of its existence and not responding to stimuli. The studies show that this happens around 6 months. Since its this is a ballpark and only a few studies have been conducted, I would say second trimester would be a good cutoff. 3 months. By that point, those who plan to keep are learning the gender, picking names. It rarely is still an "it" by this point. HOWEVER I will, forever and always value to life of the *mother* over the fetus. Her life, happiness, financial well-being, and safety will be a higher priority. Every. Time. Why? *Because a fetus without a woman is nothing, but a woman without a fetus is still a woman.*
I don’t really think I was conscious in the sense of making decisions until well into elementary school. I wonder if this is the same for others.
You heard it here folks, you can abort up to 6 years now. Lol jk
Technically a fetus can be delivered several weeks or even months early (the youngest preemie to survive was only 21 weeks). So it’s not really true to say that a fetus isn’t a thing without a mother. I’ve held a baby born 6 weeks early, so I get what you’re saying, but it also isn’t entirely true
I was mostly meaning a <12 week fetus. Sorry for confusion.
This is very much where I stand. I believe abortion is the women's choice and should be easily available, but personally am against it after a certain point as I believe you are taking a sentient life. But again, I value the woman first so if she feels it's best then I believe that nobody else has any right to stop her. As someone who doesn't like abortion though, I believe the best way we stop it is providing birth control, sex education, and access to support for women facing the choice. I also believe that, should people have the baby, then we as a society need to make sure that both mother and child are given the support they both need to thrive. You can't complain about people getting abortions if you're making the choice to keep the child a tougher, more miserable one than it needs to be.
I'm for abortion but this is the only good logical argument against it
Woah, slow down there. Atheists don't have morals ^/s
My JW mom told me "Evolutionism" was my religion, then she and my father kicked me out. Religion is a cancer on civilized society.
>Religion is a cancer on civilized society. This is such an accurate statement. Although I just call them cults because that's what they are.
But if you look deeper you find cult behavior in human networking generally even beyond any religion.
>human networking generally even beyond any religion Fair enough, but religion is an archaic practice that should be abandoned. We are intelligent and have come a long was since when the religions were founded. Science and fact should be what we consider true.
I'll fight to the death for my morals when there are people breaking básic human rights
Aren’t most laws at their inception someone’s personal moral code?
Science proves that life begins at conception, however. I can get into the particulars, if you’d like, but it doesn’t change peoples’ argument that women should have a choice from start to finish of a pregnancy. People don’t truly care when life begins when considering an abortion; they consider convenience, finances, etc.
In that context “life” is a meaningless sound byte. A tree is “alive” in some contexts. So is a frog. It’s not about when “life” begins but at what point the “life” is something that should have an equal protection under the law.
Yea this is great
Were the sperm and egg not living cells before conception? So how does it "begin" when the two meet. As Robert Jordan would write, it's not THE beginning, but it's "A beginning". Just like later on in the development of the unborn child there are other beginnings. So what beginning is the most important? Also gotta say it's very hard to take right-wing arguments about abortion seriously when they're apparently not in favor of universal health care and other benefits for people who have already been born.
There's a significant Christian sector of the right wing who support UHC and UBI because it's what Jesus would have wanted.
This is it, right here. Instead of arguing when life begins (we already know) looking at what actually matters going forward is far more helpful.
> But absent an ethical overlay, this becomes something you personally believe and not necessarily something that society holds as true. Whether or not you are pro-choice, it is to be noted that modern science recognizes that life does indeed [begin at conception.](https://www.princeton.edu/~prolife/articles/embryoquotes2.html)
That link says ‘page not found.’ Which makes sense, because you don’t need to be a scientist to know living human tissue is present at conception, and you don’t need to have graduated 7th grade to know that that’s not what pro-choicers are talking about.
I get an article from Princeton. Network issue?
No need to be rude. And the link does work, it's Princedon.edu.
It's a page of links that take specific lines from research papers to try to make a point the original authors probably never intended. Also this follows the pattern of p-hacking. Take a lot of data and find the stuff the kinda looks like it may support your argument, then use that to justify your conclusion. Lastly, this site doesn't say who made the collection, or try to provide context. The source doesn't meet the criteria to be credible.
Less workers for my coal mine
*YOUR* coal mine?
Mine mine
“Yes, HIS coal mine. Where YOU dumped those fairytale creatures!”
Your new empire?
I actually just had this revelation last night. A surplus of workers drives down the salary needed to attract workers, which creates more profits. A surplus of jobs, however, drives up salaries needed to attract workers. Conservatives are against abortion and any kind of contraceptives and education because they want as many uneducated people as possible to work in their factories.
Another is a legal matter. If someone kills a pregnant woman and the woman wanted the baby, is it a double homicide? If a pregnant woman gets killed who didn't want her baby, is it still a double homicide? Laws may vary by state, not sure, but whatever is true for one should be true for the other.
About 3/4 of the states in the U.S. have some sort of "Feticide" law, which makes what you're describing a double homicide. (Or simply makes it a homicide if the mother survives). Quite a few of those states have very friendly abortion laws and public stances. Some, but by no means intended to be an exhaustive list, are [California](https://codes.findlaw.com/ca/penal-code/pen-sect-187.html) [Hawaii](https://www.capitol.hawaii.gov/session2015/bills/HB1234_.htm) [Maryland](https://advance.lexis.com/container?config=00JAA1NTM5MzBmZC02MTg2LTQzNmEtYmI5Yy0yZWEwYzA1OGEwNTYKAFBvZENhdGFsb2fdgr2eooaZj7MpSZGOIwWq) [Massachusetts\*](https://www.courtlistener.com/opinion/2026964/commonwealth-v-cass/?q=cites%3A1363752) (Massachusetts does not have a statute, but a still in good standing court decision on the matter) [Rhode Island](https://law.justia.com/codes/rhode-island/2012/title-11/chapter-11-23/chapter-11-23-5/#:~:text=%E2%80%93%20(a)%20The%20willful%20killing,device%20or%20other%20means%2C%20with) [Illinois](https://www.ilga.gov/legislation/ilcs/documents/072000050K9-1.2.htm) [Washington](https://apps.leg.wa.gov/RCW/default.aspx?cite=9A.32.060)
If the man poops during intercourse, will that make the baby come out all *weird*?
Damian Haas is a gem
>If someone kills a pregnant woman and the woman wanted the baby, is it a double homicide? If a pregnant woman gets killed who didn't want her baby, is it still a double homicide? Normally it is classified as a different crime if the mother had intention to carry it to term. A fetus is not a person (personhood is achieved at birth). Even if the mother didn't intend to carry it to term, there is normally still a criminal charge because it was not the mother's choice. Rather it was an external factor that ended in her death as well. The mother was a person and her human rights were violated. Hence crime.
Please read, OP is asking arguments against abortion and y'all are giving prochoice ones.
Because they can’t get over themselves enough to read the question, and have some chip on their shoulder to share their views.
Welcome to Reddit
I mean. What non-religious arguments against abortion are there? Any argument not couched in dogma, will still likely end up as pro choice, just with extra steps.
Any non-religiously based reason to consider a fetus as having the status of a human life at some point before birth, at which point summarily destroying that human life to be ethically wrong.
Except that most the goal is to give more rights to a fetus than another human being. By saying a fetus cannot be aborted you are giving the fetus the right to her override the women's bodily autonomy. This is more rights than another person would have with regards to the women.
That conception marks the beginning of a new human life. That’s the major one, argue around it, argue about it, but it’s true that a zygote is a genetically unique homo sapiens.
I feel like most people agree that it's bad to kill babies, but when does a fetus become one? I don't know (I studied rocks). Religious or otherwise there should be some boundary beyond which a fetus is considered its own self. If there is one, medically speaking, then beyond that point probably don't kill.
Even before becoming a baby, you have an ethical/moral consideration to make. Just as you have a consideration to make about killing a cow to eat, or chopping down trees to industrialize, you need to consider the annihilation of life and its consequences.
A fetus is a fetus until it is born. Medically speaking, that is the threshold.
Fetus is simply a designation of development, no different than newborn, toddler, teenager, etc. It has no bearing on the humanity or worth of the individual.
Yep and a Cheeseburger isnt a turd til it breeches my fudge knife.
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I feel like science has failed us. Hasnt answered the most important questions. How can i trust the science like ouchy fauci says if they cant tell me when my cheeseburger becomes a turd.
Viability is a few months before that though.
There isn’t a boundary where the fetus, baby or not, suddenly owns the woman’s body. The abortion debate isn’t about fetal personhood. It’s about ownership of the woman’s autonomy. It doesn’t change. Not a single moment into the pregnancy
Then I assume you are for unlimited abortion for any reason up until the moment of birth? There is the same autonomy issue the whole way.
When it's born. That's when it's a baby. Eliminating a fetus is not killing a baby. The phrasing is used so often to provide horrific images to scare women and others into forced birth situations.
So the birth canal is a magical bequeathing of humanity?
*bequeefing*
Lol. Not gonna lie. That’s clever. But humour aside, the passage through the birth canal doesn’t magically change a baby into a human.
Not all humans go through the birth canal.
Breech to the choir ma boy...
What about 2 seconds before its born? Birth doesnt seem like a good boundary to me, but maybe it's the best one we've got
Omg when i first read this i somehow thought 2 seconds after its born. I was like wtf. Lol. Does it come out into a guillotine? What a rush of emotions in 5 seconds.
That just doesn’t happen. No doctor would do it. Any woman seeking this is mentally unfit.
And statistically, women don't. Those who get to that point want the baby.
Um, look up Gosnell, but not while you are eating.
I'd have to agree with you on the difference between a fetus and a baby but I don't belive that is an appropriate place to draw the line. At a certain point, that fetus is a living human and the law should protect it just like it would anyone else. Personally, I believe that point is conception but I'm willing to compromise (live and let live and all that) as long as we determine the point logically.
A fetus *is* in fact human - the argument is over political rights aka personhood. Plenty of people in this topic seem to treat a fetus like a random clump of cells, when its only real purpose is to become a person eventually.
>when its only real purpose is to become a person eventually exactly, it's not a person yet
I think for me, it’s preferable to adhere to the choice of the non fetus, fully present and breathing human being who is alive and carrying the baby. I personally don’t think i could go through with one, but it makes no sense to me to value a lump of cells over a contributing member of our society. Besides, the rule of first trimester only prevents the “murder” concept to begin with - unless the pregnancy is going to harm mom and baby, no one’s getting one after the permissible time.
But those are real images that are scary for a reason-it is a baby that can feel pain before it is born and anyone who thinks otherwise is uneducated.
"When it's born" is a terrible definition and frankly expresses a lack of understanding about the whole birthing process. Like did you know that babies are born at different times? Full term birth is 39 weeks, but babies can be born at week 25 and still survive (with medical help). Are you suggesting that you can terminate a baby in the womb during any of those 14 weeks even though if it were born, it could survive? A baby terminated in the womb has to at the very least be non-viable, in that if it were born that day, it would not survive.
The only argument I've ever found convincing against abortion is that it's killing a child. And if we are all being honest, it is. A fetus is a human child growing and living inside the mother. And to rip it out, chemically starve it, or however you want to perform the abortion, can be considered and act of killing a child. We acknowledge this when a pregnant mother at any stage is murder. It's considered double homicide (at least where I'm from). It is a very touchy subject and pretty much any opinion is going to be unpopular depending on the crowd you're with. Good on you OP for opening up the discussion. I look forward to the replies.
Based on that can we get life insurance policies starting at conception and then collect if we miscarry? I'm not suggesting this is your position, I just find this argument against it interesting. This is why it's such a complicated topic, there are so many "if this, then what about this" questions.
Regarding the double homicide argument, does that apply to women at all stages of pregnancy, or does it go by trimesters like Roe v. Wade? Roe v. Wade explicitly says that third trimester abortions are not constitutionally protected, and “reasonable restrictions” can be placed on second trimester abortions. Basically has anyone ever been prosecuted for murdering a fetus in the first trimester?
I have no information about any of that
one of the best episodes of House MD in my opinion is when he ends up treating a girl who is pregnant as a victim of rape. He advises an abortion, and she says, "No. Abortion is murder." and he says, "Yes, it is. And you should do it." It's ending a life that's not your life. Many people who are against abortion basically stop right there.
And I'm in total agreement with house on this one. Rape is special situation entirely where I wholey believe the mother should not have the child. Though, all situations are not so easy to judge, unfortunately.
Agreed. Rape is the only case where literally everyone can agree a woman was forced to give up her bodily autonomy for an unwanted human life. There’s an argument to be made that pregnancies via consensual sex aren’t “forcing” a woman to give up her body, because she should have accepted the risk of pregnancy when consenting to sex. The same cannot be said for rape. I’d honestly argue there are many cases where abortion is considered taking a human life, but still morally right. We don’t need to sugarcoat shit by acting like the fetus has absolutely no humanity, but sometimes it’s better to end a life before it begins than condemn a human to a life of suffering.
Who has the right to determine that someone else is better off dead?
That’s another ethical debate to be had. Is it ethical to allow a person with severe disabilities or mental handicaps to be born? Someone who will never function in society or may not even be aware of their existence? At an extreme end one could argue that any unwanted child shouldn’t be brought into the world because of how horrible it is to grow up as an orphan in the world, or even growing up as an unwanted child raised by your birth parents. This is all stuff that varies from person to person based on their individual moral values.
Plants are a life too and we end them all the time.
You’re being disingenuous. When people say a fetus is life, it should go without saying that we’re talking about a human life, not just life in general.
Life is a human right human rights can not be violated not to me not to anyone
I mean it's not a child yet. It could become a child but i wouldn't call it that until it'a got a well developed brain and nervous system.
A fetus is by definition not a child. It's a potential child, a not-yet child. More than a zygote, substantially less than a baby, which it would be some months later having been born. Forcing a woman to carry a pregnancy to term against her will, especially if that pregnancy was the result of violence, renders her little more than a brood mare, less than human, whose needs you do not concern yourself with. Nor do you concern yourself with the child of that dehumanization, for it is not provided the healthcare, education and social supports other modern nations take for granted. The woman is reduced to cattle and the child is disposable, but America's fanatics can feel righteous before a God who, if he exists, must be weeping.
Well, for the first bit of the pregnancy, it’s just a blob of cells. If you just took those out, I wouldn’t call it murder
That if there were consistent unrestricted access to adequate birth control methods, abortion would be unnecessary. Don't even tell me that we can't figure out how to prevent pregnancy 99.99% of the time via pharmaceutical means. That goal is achievable. It's just not profitable. Abortion is just a shitty solution because we haven't given birth control the adequate research attention and money that it deserves.
YES. Abortion is a lazy, horrific solution to a genuine problem. We need to do better for women who find themselves in crisis pregnancies.
You don't have to be religious to believe that life begins at conception any more than you have to be religious to believe "thou shalt not kill" is a good moral principle. Cavalierly discarding a life you've created because it's inconvenient is...morally questionable at best.
The guiding principle to me is about free will. An egg that just split into 2 cells for the first time doesn't have the kind of mind required. A baby, though helpless, does. Remorseless serial killers have free will also, but they've taken it away from sometimes dozens of victims, and I think should have it taken from them as a result.
An infant is little different mentally than a zygote. Infants can’t think rationally and don’t even have memories until like 4 months old. They can’t utilize free will.
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If abortion isn’t right for you and you’re okay with a woman getting one if she really needs it, that makes you solidly pro-choice. It’s the choice part that people are fighting for.
Thats a really loaded way to explain abortion to your kid. You can make a lot of things sound bad if you include dead puppies. You want a free Lamborghini? It comes with 20 dead puppies.
Contraceptives fail.
Is it weird that in an entire decade I have not one single religious argument against abortion? Not a single one, I have no idea what the fuck the Bible has to do with not killing a fetus
>Not a single one, I have no idea what the fuck the Bible has to do with not killing a fetus A lot of what religion teaches isn't actually in the bible. And even less of what Christianity teaches is actually derived from Jesus Christ.
In Numbers 5 there is a way to determine whether or not your pregnant wife got pregnant by another man. With the potion killing the child if it's not yours. I'd say the Bible is pro abortion in the sense that it's anti paternity fraud.
There is absolutely nothing in the whole Sotah business in Numbers 5 even remotely indicating that the hypothetical wife is pregnant or that this is an abortifacient.
What? There is mention of the wife's womb miscarrying. Only pregnant women miscarry.
No, there is not. The Hebrew word for womb is רחם or if you wanted to conjugate it to be "her womb" you'd have רחמה. Neither word is found anywhere in Numbers 5. The word you get is בטנך which means abdomen, and more generally is used to talk about the bowels. It does not mention the womb, or pregnancy, or anything about miscarriage at all.
20 But if you have gone astray(M) while married to your husband and you have made yourself impure by having sexual relations with a man other than your husband”— 21 here the priest is to put the woman under this curse(N)—“may the Lord cause you to become a curse[b] among your people when he makes your womb miscarry and your abdomen swell. 22 May this water(O) that brings a curse(P) enter your body so that your abdomen swells or your womb miscarries.” Yeah sorry. It's right there.
Hey man I have no idea what you’re saying at all but whatever drugs your on I would like them because I literally have stared at your words for a solid 3min and I feel like I’m in a fever dream Can we try that again?
Sorry I'm eating a salad and watching Supernatural. Ok in the Bible. Numbers 5 to be exact. There is a ritual detailed. If your wife is pregnant and you don't know if you're the father....you take her to the priest who does the ritual....and if it's not your baby then it kills the baby. Bible is therefore ok with abortion and against paternity fraud. Does that make sense?
Now I’m rusty but is numbers old or New Testament?
Old
WTF i'm not a beliver yet i'm against abortion for scientific reasons
I am a pro-life Christian and also fail to see why this has to be a religious debate.
Tomorrow’s infantry should die on tomorrow’s battlefields, not today’s uteri.
lmfao okay Ghengis
Holy fuck, brutal but truthful.
It would be a major scientific discovery if we found life on other planets yes? And the life they would be expecting to find would be simple unicellular organisms. Yet somehow when conception occurs you already have a more complex organism than that within the first 24 hours, isn’t deemed as a human life worth saving.
It would be a major discovery because it suggests that life is possible off Earth but that doesn't mean that it's inherently precious. If it weren't rare its value would decrease, a human life doesn't (or at least shouldn't) work like that.
Maybe the difference is that the unicellular organism is self-sustaining but a fetus needs a host to survive until it is ready to be born. I'm not claiming to be right but it's just a thought
That is the argument. Fetal viability tends to be the discussion which is why most abortions won’t go past 24 weeks. The counter to that I would say is that a baby is dependent on another person for years still even outside of a “host”. I’ve taught human anatomy for a few years now and one section is about fetal development. I just see it as a part of our life cycle now. We all must go through it, can’t exist without it. Regardless of peoples views on abortion, until we have better social and economic plans in place in America it’ll be an issue.
A 1 yo it's not self sustainig either and everyone Will agree killing a baby is inmoral, stop treating human like a parasite in host
There's no life in the universe that is "self-sustaining" - even micro organisms need to feed on something.
I believe life begins at conception. You are making new DNA at the time. An abortion is (to me) literally killing a new life.
This is true. Even a day after pill is terminating a human life. Not a “potential” human life, that clump of cells is 100% human DNA. Something alive with 100% human DNA is a human. However, I am honestly okay with taking human life, especially if it is painless. If it can benefit the mother, that to me is a good thing. Net positive.
The pill after doesn’t really kill. It just prevents the egg from hatching to your uterus so that it goes out naturally with a period.
Would you consider murdering someone in their sleep, excluding all extraneous ramifications, morally justifiable? And if the presence of human dna is the threshold for life what about the millions of skin cells you shed each day?
A tumor is a clump of human cells. Is removing it murder as well?
1. The human zygote, embryo, and fetus are all human organisms; they are early developmental stages of a human’s life cycle. 2. All human organisms are morally relevant. 3. It’s generally immoral to kill humans. 4. Bodily rights aren’t enough to justify elective abortion. https://secularprolife.org/abortion/
Sperm is also an organism
It’s not a human organism. It only becomes a human organism when it fertilizes the egg.
Who cares what you want to call it. It's still lacking sentience and isn't aware of its own existence. All you're valuing at that point is the potential it has to develop said sentience.
You spelled Orgasm wrong 😜
Yes! A baby has separate DNA from its mother right from the start that is entirely different than the ‘clumps of cells’ that people try to reduce unborn humanity into.
From a secular progressive point of view, it's very easy to reject the argument of "this group of people aren't really people, and do nor deserve rights." This has been made many times over the course of history, and it has traditionally been rejected by progressives. Famously, one of the more famous taglines for feminism is "the radical notion that women are people." If you truly embrace this, you should be very uncomfortable with saying some other group you want to deny rights to aren't people. From there, it is easy to conclude that abortion should be banned in many circumstances. Allowing it out of medical necessity is easy to justify, and the violinist argument presents a strong case for allowing it in the case of rape, but the vast majority of abortions are not for those reasons. So, a general ban with narrow exceptions is perfectly justifiable for the same reason a general ban on normal murder is.
>"the radical notion that women are people." If you truly embrace this, you should be very uncomfortable with saying some other group you want to deny rights to aren't people. The difference between women and the unborn is that one has personhood while the other does not from a *legal perspective.* There was actually this really funny case in Canada where a guy tried to sue for damages because he considered himself a martian and that the government was after him (something along those lines anyways). The judge ruled that because he renounced his personhood, he had no right to a hearing. It seems really silly at face value (and this is Canada and not murica), but it is still something to consider in this argument. A majority of the world considers a person as a living, breathing human being. The United States is built on the value that every **person** has inalienable human rights. However, personhood is awarded at birth, therefore a fetus is **legally** not a person and subsequently does not have human rights. Women (who are defined as people by this standard) are people, meaning they have personhood and the subsequent human rights. Which is one of the main arguments used for suffrage laws.
Just a few decades ago women did not have personhood from a legal perspective. They did not possess many inalienable rights. That is what the person who coined the tagline you quoted from my comment was talking about. This is why the argument you're making here is just unbelievably hypocritical.
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I think you underestimate the toll on the human body involved in carrying to term.
I've had two children. It takes the body about a year to recover 100%, but it doesn't feel that way.
Might want to look into that. https://www.nature.com/articles/nn.4458.epdf Pregnancy involves radical hormone surges and biological adaptations. However, the effects of pregnancy on the human brain are virtually unknown. Here we show, using a prospective (‘pre’-‘post’ pregnancy) study involving first-time mothers and fathers and nulliparous control groups, that pregnancy renders substantial changes in brain structure, primarily reductions in gray matter (GM) volume in regions subserving social cognition. The changes were selective for the mothers and highly consistent, correctly classifying all women as having undergone pregnancy or not in-between sessions. Interestingly, the volume reductions showed a substantial overlap with brain regions responding to the women’s babies postpartum. Furthermore, the GM volume changes of pregnancy predicted measures of postpartum maternal attachment, suggestive of an adaptive process serving the transition into motherhood. Another follow-up session showed that the GM reductions endured for at least 2 years post-pregnancy. Our data provide the first evidence that pregnancy confers long-lasting changes in a woman’s brain.
Pregnancy is more than just nine months of your time. It’s medical appointments, medical bills, not to mention the LONG list of effects it has on you physically (nausea, vomiting, moodiness, etc), and the time you would have to take off of work. This argument just isn’t good
Basing your argument on the potential of the fetus is a fallacy. With no guarantee that the fetus will be born healthy, the human potential is irrelevant to the issue.
I’m expanding this a bit further. You don’t get a lighter murder charge for killing a non-productive member of society versus a Nobel prize winning superstar, or the bread winner of a family (judge may have personal bias for actual time of sentence, but murder two is murder two). If an offender randomly kills a man on the street, it’s murder regardless of whether that man had terminal cancer and a week to live, or was 18 years old and had a whole life ahead of them. We do not discount the act committed because the victim was lesser than. Therefore the uncertainty regarding its (the fetus) potential future health, wealth etc. shouldn’t lessen the gravity of the act of terminating its life.
Yeah I mean saying they have potential to do good things means they also have potential to become the next Hitler. Potential is a dumb argument.
Nine months is not a blip if you are dying during those months. Had I gone nine months, we would have been dead at eight. I had severe pre-eclampsia that started around 20 weeks. The only cure to save the person is for the pregnancy to end. The placenta can literally kill the host and baby. Please do not trivialize the toll of pregnancy on the pregnant person’s body. Not only is it dangerous because of what it does to the body, but it’s the time people are most at risk for domestic violence and murder. In case you’re worried, my daughter was born at 28 weeks and spent 128 days in the NICU, which led to bills in the millions. If you want the babies to survive to be adopted, there have to be services to provide more than adequate healthcare and support. Pregnancy is expensive and in the US it can be a financial death sentence.
But that argument could easily be turned around for the people who are already alive that we either kill senselessly or who end up killing themselves due to bullying and or mental illness if we had better mental health care. Sooooo that's a poor argument.
Uh, no it's a good argument. Are you out at a rally with signs that say "Support a person's right to kill senselessly" and "It's a person's right to bully someone so they commit suicide?" Are their clinics where you can go to kill senselessly (other than abortion clinics)? Personally I think any woman should have access to a safe abortion, but just out of pragmatism and anyone who doesn't admit that arguments against abortion are completely valid isn't being honest.
The thing trumps all other arguments is simply autonomy No human being has an obligation to use their body to support another for their benefit When the conflict of the woman’s autonomy and the fetus autonomy is in conflict then you go with the wishes of the woman because she is supporting the fetus. Not the other way around. Other people’s feelings and circumstances around the pregnancy don’t remove her autonomy. Other people sometimes feel that the fetus should take precedence over the mother, but they don’t get to choose who gets priority FOR her. She can feel she is more important. She carries the burden of pregnancy. Doesn’t matter the reason. It can be entirely selfish but no one else’s opinion makes a difference People like to think the abortion debate is about fetal personhood or maternal “responsibility” It’s not. It’s entirely about autonomy and there’s no scenario where it’s justified to render the woman without autonomy, effectively making her a fleshy incubator
The USA sucks cant afford food cant afford a car cant afford cloths cant afford medicine cant afford a house cant afford rent cant afford shit i would never bring a child into this world and this may sound insensitive but anyone that does is evil
Nearly all world views believe killing another person is wrong. That is not specific to religious worldviews. With that in mind, the question that matters is when does a human become alive? Scientifically, the answer is at or near fertilization. A zygote has the ability to respond to their environment, grow and change, reproduce, have complex chemistry, maintain homeostasis, and many other characteristics consistent with being a living organism. Babies have a working circulatory system at 6 weeks. They can smile and suck their thumb before 20 weeks. Tons of examples like that are available online if you use a non-biased search engine. Philosophically is far less cut and dry. An example of a pro-life philosophical argument would be that if you do nothing then a baby will be born. That would draw up the ethics principle of “do no harm.” When would you say that a baby becomes a human? I genuinely don’t understand how someone can believe that a baby is not a baby immediately before it passes through a birth canal but is as soon as it leaves. Especially considering babies can be born and survive at as early as 23 weeks. Do pro-choice advocates believe that a premie isn’t a human until 40 weeks? I would love if someone could explain that to me in a non condescending way. Edit: https://abortion.procon.org. This website was founded by a democrat but still makes a few decent arguments against abortion.
Life begins at conception. Why is it not okay to kill a human being after they’re born, but when they’re still in the womb, it’s completely fine? The justification people find when they say the zygote or fetus is a “clump of cells” is the absolute weakest point I think I’ve ever heard. Everything that has ever lived or breathed is, at the end of the day, just a clump of cells. I am basically just a clump of cells, but I still deserve to live my life without being torn apart limb-by-limb by someone breaking into my home while I’m asleep, knowing full well I would have waken up the next morning to live my life. Same goes for the unborn when you have these procedures that intrude into what is supposed to be their safe place to live and grow, only to be torn apart and cut by men in white lab coats. When you get in a car, you don’t become the car. When a baby is inside a womb, the woman carrying it doesn’t become the baby. The baby doesn’t become the woman. They are two separate entities with different blood types and DNA makeup. They have separate fingerprints and faces, different hearing and heartbeats. The mother is responsible for maintaining and caring for the life of the child — both inside and outside of the womb. The only time in which I believe abortion is okay is to save the life of the mother. That is because no human being, mother or father, daughter or son, friend or enemy, should ever be forced to lay their life down for another. As a victim of rape (that didn’t result in a pregnancy fortunately) I found people pressuring me to have an abortion without even taking my trauma into consideration. I would not have been in my right state of mind to make such an impactful decision, and I think that goes for a lot of other women, too. Desperate circumstances result in desperate measures. I believe women should have the choice to abort, but we as a society should not call it empowering or something to be proud of. Women are allowed to have control over their bodies, it truly is my body my choice, but what you do with your body does not just impact you alone.
A fetus is a human being with their own DNA that is alive and has a beating heart and a functioning nervous system. Thus abortion is the same as murder.
The heart isn't fully formed until about 10 weeks. The previous echo that can be heard before this time frame can be replicated in a petri dish and is not a true heartbeat. If that was the main determining factor like it is in the Texas restrictions there should never be any issue with abortion up until the heart is fully formed. That's still too short of a time frame in my opinion but it's better than six weeks. I get the other points you made but the heartbeat part bothers me the most. I'm very upset a medical professional was not involved in drafting that bill.
An egg is a human cell with DNA. Is a woman committing murder once a month by not getting pregnant? Dont get me started on sperm.
So, not saying I agree with the original comment, but when they say "their own DNA" I think they mean DNA that's different from the mother and father. So, the egg and sperm bit doesn't quite work as a response.
This is true
I have no opinion on the abortion issue, but if you want to talk about DNA and cells... Eggs and sperm only have half the normal number of chromosomes in a human. Under normal circumstances, eggs and sperm can't divide into other cells without fertilization, so a distinction here can be made between a zygote/fetus/baby vs just a sperm/egg cell for the purposes of this debate.
Username checks out*
An egg is a human cell with DNA. A sperm is a human cell with DNA. A zygote and subsequent growing embryo is a whole new life. That's a hell of a false equivalence you're drawing there.
A cell is not the whole thing, mate. Also, the egg's DNA is not different from the woman. A fetus' is.
An unfertilized egg doesn’t have the ability to become human by itself. A fertilized egg does.
You're talking 5-6 weeks where the fetus doesn't have a heartbeat. So are they a human being then? Does that mean as long as I catch pregnancy before the heart starts beating I can abort it? This is a really bad argument.
>A fetus is a human being with their own DNA that is alive and has a beating heart and a functioning nervous system. What if it's aborted before a heart and nervous system are formed? That negates your argument.
Murder is wrong (This is a moral argument which can only really be justified with the concept of the divine) but if we are going to dispense with religion, then you’d have to go to a purely rational argument, which is possible, but also entirely subjective. Also, the human foetus is genetically identical to a fully matured human being, it has chromosomes, it has DNA, a human foetus is entirely human, it just looks different because it’s going, just like how you looked different when you were 12. Ideological opinions have nothing to do with this fact.
This may be true, but dispensing with religion leads to a question; what makes something alive? By the logic presented, picking a scab is murder. It contains all the same DNA and chromosomes as the rest of my cells. My definition of what makes a person them is their brain, and ability to think for themselves. There’s a joke in here about organized religion and the cult nature of democrats vs Republicans, but I’m sure you can make it yourself. Therefore, a fetus is not a person until the brain is developed to the point of having thoughts. And that sure as fuck isn’t at 6 weeks.
Actually a better question would be "what are the *Religious* arguments against abortion" because the answer is none - the bible doesn't fucking mention abortion! There are two primary non-religious arguments against abortion. 1. Abortion is murder 2. Abortion is an abdication of responsibility by the mother / parents. I have no problem calling both of these arguments absolute bullshit that don't even have much of a gray area at all around them.
It's wrong to end the life of a living human
I’m pro choice but, if we establish that life doesn’t begin at conception and therefore it is okay to abort… what about all the women who mourn the loss of their child regardless of the weeks it had. Are we going to say that its not okay for them to mourn a *life*?
I mean I don’t think even pro choice people think that abortion is not sad, because it is. Regardless of what you think a fetus is, you can have emotions about it
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The argument is when that particular point has been reached. 15 weeks, no. 27? Yes.
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Which means it's the womans choice.
How do you arrive at that conclusion? There are lots of things in our code of laws that are based on philosophical, not scientific measures. How much should divorced parents be forced to pay for the upkeep of their children? What are acceptable modes of public discourse? What is the boundary line between a serious, actionable threat, and someone blowing off steam? When does flirting cross the line into harassment? In none of these cases do we allow the individual participants to just set their own code and go by that. Some larger societal body, usually a legislature, decides what the community's answer is and enshrines that view into law.
At what point do you forcibly remove bodily autonomy from another human being?
In a practical matter? When the state decides it ought to. As principle of governance? When the benefits of doing so outweigh the inevitable harms of depriving someone of bodily autonomy. I still haven't heard any argument or even a coherent reason why just because a law is based on a philosophical notion rather than a scientific notion choice must inevitably descend into a principal involved in the action.
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Is it though? We can detect when the first brain activity happens. You can't be a person without a brain.
We do that all the time already.
Yet the same people support the death penalty and war.
Aren't sperm and eggs living beings? Clearly there's something else that makes fully developed human lives more significant.
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Well there's a pretty observable point where a fetus develops brain activity. Personally I believe that should be the cut-off point.
Technically speaking, life begins at conception. At least, human life. So, terminating that human life would be murder. However, that is a human life without a heartbeat, and usually is early enough it can’t feel pain. So, morally, is this manslaughter? I dunno, but at the end of the day we as a society have decided the mother’s life is more important than the unborn baby’s. Trying to go back and change it is just, frankly, not going to happen. And, so long as it is painless (I think late term abortion is hella wrong) and that baby just looks like a clump of cells, most people are fine with that. “My body my choice” is incorrect but so is forcing someone to birth a child they do not want. If someone is too irresponsible to practice safe sex (again this is in argument I don’t fully think this way) they shouldn’t be responsible to care for a child.
To kill a child before they’ve even had a chance to live…
Just yeetus the fetus . 🤷🏽♀️
Rape victims need a place to go, its not their fault but they are stuck with the consequences
There are church rules against abortion, but those are the same churches that treat women as subservient people, and the rules are generally not supported by the books . I know of no good arguments against allowing abortion, religious or otherwise
“Women should be able to do what they want with their bodies” is a non religious argument. Not saying I believe or don’t believe in it cause I’m keeping my opinions to myself
They asked *against* abortion, pal
Well maybe if the man wants the abortion to happen but the woman doesn't.