Warbler addressed many of the same issues in the same way I would have, but I'll have my go at it as well.
CP3S said:
Warbler said:
CP3S said:
If everyone would just mind their own business on matters like this, life would be so much more enjoyable.
that's right, lets mind are own business . . . and pay no attention to that doctor murdering a child behind that curtain.
The definition of "murder" is technically an unlawful killing. Abortion is legal, this is not murder.
Exactly as Warbler said: just because it is permitted by law does not make it right. I still don't define it as murder because I believe ignorantly killing someone to be different from doing so knowingly. That does not make it less wrong to me, but rather makes the killer less culpable.
What does it hurt you, living in New Jersey, if some woman in California decides to terminate her pregnancy? The answer: not at all whatsoever. You are entirely unaffected, 100%.
If someone were to kill you, living in Tennessee (is that right?), what would it affect me, living in AZ? I'd wonder why you never came around the site, but I wouldn't shed a single tear for your passing. I wouldn't even know.
Allowing things like murder and rape to go without punishment or consequences would create anarchy. Obviously, I don't want to have to worry about being picked off by someone every time I step out my door because he might think my car is nice or that the girl I am with is pretty and he wants them for himself. Nobody does. It'd make life miserable and society would crumble.
If anarchy is the only motive for preserving life, then lets take things to an opposite extreme, as you chose to do so later in your quote. According to atheistic thought, humans are merely an anomalous byproduct of billions of years of this universe's existence and infinite cycles of previous universes. What do we care if we snuff ourselves out? We have proven to be nothing more than a destructive force of nature. Ultimately our universe will end anyway. What does it matter if we all kill each other sooner or later?
And rape was not such a strange thing in past centuries. The women of conquered peoples were raped all the time. Women were often in danger of being raped even by their own peoples, and if they were, it was not a crime against the woman but rather against her man. And yet ancient cultures who ascribed to these views and laws were not in a state of anarchy.
My point to this is that even these things that we see as awful by our modern lenses were not always seen as such or may not always be seen as such. All morals are either purely subjective (if you believe that humans are the ultimate intelligence) or dependent on a higher being.
Again, what does some aborted fetus that you never even knew existed do to harm you or society or anyone else in this country other than the two people who conceived it? Again, nada. All those abortion that took place this very day, this week, and the past month, they had nothing to do with you and they didn't harm you. They don't effect your life in anyway.
According to WikiAnswers, 150,000 people died today. Not one of them affected my life in any way. Clearly it does me no harm. Sure, maybe they hurt others, but is a person's life's value measured by how many others are hurt by his/her death? Then Kim Jong-Il was a far more valuable person than you or I. Then the poor old man who died in his home a few years back and was not even discovered for over a year was no better than a bunch of unformed cells with human DNA.
Or.....
The value of human life is not dependent on how much that life affects me.
It is a little sad a potential person was snuffed out, they could have gone onto be someone awesome, so it goes. But if you are going to use that argument, I suppose you could take it just a modicum farther and say that it is truly a shame about all those potential pregnancies that would go on to produce potential people if it weren't for condoms and other forms of birth control.
Well, I'm glad it's a little sad. But there is clearly a great deal of difference between an unfertilized ovum or a million sperm dying in a condom. An embryo is genetically human. It is self-replicating. It is human life. It will continue to develop. On its present course it will continue to develop into a an adult, continuing to contribute to the human gene pool, become a member of society, and live a full individual life. It has not yet gained sentience, but then, neither has a month-old child. It has not yet accrued memories, but then, do memories grant human rights? Many have lost memories or are long-term comas and cannot produce new memories? Are their lives forfeit?
It is all about morality and forcing that morality on others. You think abortion is wrong, and therefore you don't want anybody to be able to do it... Well, that is unless it is done in away that you approve of, of course, such as in the instances of rape. It is totally the wrongful murder of an innocent baby, unless his daddy was a rapist, then it's cool if you want to kill the little tike.
As I've argued in the politics thread and I repeat here, any law we hold, any societal norm, heck, even your statement that we should not impose our morals on others is, in fact, a real or attempted imposition of someone's morals on others, including those who may not agree. Take many Muslims in the Middle East who in fact feel morally obligated to 'share' their moral view with the rest of the world. And just look at any law. With perhaps rare exceptions, most of those laws were put in place because a sizable portion of society determined that something was immoral, and because others who either did not find it immoral or else did not think that moral applied to them, a law was created to make illegal the violation of that societal moral. Forgery is morally wrong, so we created a law to protect others, even though some people don't see it as wrong or personally applicable. Identity theft is wrong. Killing is wrong. This is why we set up these laws.
Half of our society think abortion should only be legal in some circumstances and another 5th in no circumstances. Yet the minority (one third) has in fact imposed their view that we must accept all abortions if the pregnant mother sees fit instead of protecting a defenseless life.
Whichever way we choose to go, pro-life or pro-choice, someone is imposing their morality on someone else. The societal morals that we are potentially infringing upon are either "consciously and prematurely ending a human life" or "imposing your moral viewpoint on someone else." All societies have determined one to be wrong in most cases. All societies have determined the other to be necessary every time they formulate new laws. Guess which side I joined with.
so you believe that the fetus is human life, yet you are willing to allow women to decide to kill them?
Yup.
Hey! I'm pro-choice too. I believe everyone has the right to choose to have sex, which is inherently and inseparably tied to reproduction. Thus, they have made the choice to take a risk at getting pregnant. They made a choice that affected their body. But I don't believe they have to choice to destroy another body, even if that body is forming inside their own.
CP3S said:
snuffing that out should not be something taken lightly.
Sadly, under a pro-choice banner, it usually is.
Just like many argued that slavery was in fact not immoral because slaves were not full-fledged humans in their eyes (obviously the Secession thread is springing up in my thought processes), and just because the Northerners were not affected by the abuse of slaves in the South, and just because slave owners felt that they had the right to choose to do whatever they wished with the sub-human lives over which they had control, that did not make the fight of the abolitionists, many of whom had probably never even seen a black person in all their life, from fighting for the rights of a people who were powerless to do anything about their plight on their own.
Even if an abortion affects no one else, it does in fact affect one person at a minimum. Sadly, that someone will never live to an age where he/she can complain about it, and because you never hear that complaint, "it doesn't affect [anyone]." Like an abolitionist, I will fight for the rights of the powerless, silent victims that I've never met.