eh bible has already been proven incorrect literally.

while i would agree this would also prove it wrong, darwin and geologists still do it better

The over-dramatic figurative "destruction" of the woman's life does not accurately balance against the physical "destruction" of the baby's life (again, under the assumption that killing the baby is wrong). Giving birth to the baby and putting it up for adoption (a story like this will easily bring enough attention that one could find a willing couple) is a better option than killing the baby.

I don't intend to try to convince you that killing a baby is wrong, but it's a broader commentary on the type of thinking that either side may have in this conversation. As with any debate (I think this is more often a political debate than it is a moral one -- but that's another conversation), the actual discussion has far more nuance than what is commonly heard.

For example, your position is quite over-simplified:

I intentionally set aside the "especially in the case of rape" because you seem to indicate that rape isn't the central issue. The central issue is that a woman should not be forced to bear a child she does not wish to. What is the underlying moral precept here? Does it extend to "a woman should not be forced to raise a child she does not wish to"? If not, why not? What is the distinction that in one way allows a woman to elect not to take care of her child in one situation, but reverses that responsibility in another?*

I've heard the debate many times and have never heard a really good argument in favor of elective abortions** that treat the unborn child as a person with some form of dignity. You might have an argument that I haven't heard before, and I'm willing to hear what you've got.

* Certain legal protocols have been invented that allow women to drop off unwanted children that are young enough. This again points to a legal discussion and not a moral one.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Safe-haven_law

This law is sort of a compromise position that attempts to endow the child with more opportunities for life while still allowing the mother to not take care of her child. As noted above, I don't understand the "moral right" to not take care of your baby, but that's what some people think is appropriate. I think it's an interesting discussion to hear people flesh out their ideas on this topic, because very often they find things that they don't expect in their own positions once they start to bear down a bit and really give it careful thought.

On a less serious note, there's a story out there from Oklahoma(?) where a woman dropped off her teenage son because she was tired of taking care of him.

** The discussion about abortions to save the life of the mother is a different conversation entirely. See below.

---

This is a different circumstance. The choice here is no longer about a figurative*** and literal destruction of life, but (explicitly) two literal destructions of life. The moral dilemma of destroying one life (literally) to save another (literally) is a completely different decision.

*** I don't buy that figurative destruction of the woman's life is really on the table here. All sorts of people have life circumstances thrown at them, and this does not absolve them of any moral responsibilities.

it's not awful, you just aren't using enough brainpower to compute it. a very important part of an individuals life is based on value of self and identity. whether you think you're pro-choice as me or not is irrelevant. having healthy relationships with your parents and family is a very important part of child development. when everyone at your school in elementary is saying, "my dad is stronger, my dad is smarter etc. " do you really think the kid with the rapist dad is going to feel like an equal?

for you to unequivocally dismiss my argument as awful simply because you haven't given it more than a fraction of thought doesn't weaken the argument at all.

and yes, I think if there were statistics regarding rape babies and suicide, there would be a positive correlation between suicide and having a rapist parent.

just look at crime. regardless of race, growing up in a fatherless home correlates with a higher chance of being a criminal later in life. knowing you were the product of a horrible event in your mothers life, how do you NOT think that would have an effect on a baby..

child - "hey mom, remember when I was conceived?"

mom - of course I do, it was the worst thing that happened in my life and made me hate myself and now I can't get close to anyone or trust men"

*child kills self*

Do you think the kid with the deadbeat dad who he never sees is going to feel like an equal in this conversation? I think you're being grotesquely naive here.

1) You're welcome to imagine all the statistics you want, but it's a completely different beast to deal in reality.
2) The fact that you think "fatherless home" and "rape baby" (that was carried all the way into life) somehow correlate suggests that you're ignorant.

You have a very strange understanding of parenting.

i understand its different. if you want, disregard the rape baby circumstance. lets just focus on this. either way, regardless, if you destroy one life to save another, you are still performing an abortion. if a pro lifer disagrees with this and says its because we lose one life to save another then they themselves do not see this as you said:

"if you believe that abortion is wrong, then it's wrong for reasons other than the circumstances of conception"

and i add to the end of that statement regardless of life sacrificed. by your logic if it is wrong, then its wrong.

There's a distinction which you are failing to make, and that is a matter of the intent of the actions. For example, a premature C-section can be done in a way that attempts to preserve both lives, so that it is not necessary to willfully kill the baby in order to save the life of the mother. It is true that such a medical procedure may ultimately end up killing the baby (or the mother or both), but this does not make the procedure an "abortion." This conflation of ideas (any procedure that ends in death is an abortion) is a large error.

Also, I'm interested in your thoughts on the primary conversation (abortion in general), not the tangent (abortion to save the mother).

if you wont accept this circumstance that unless the baby is aborted then during birth whether c section or natural birth both mother and baby will die, then i will have to concede my point and say that the person who disagrees with abortion will never find a time when it is ok. and i totally disagree with that thought process, not that it wasn't evident.

im still not really sure if this is the 'primary conversation' you want to discuss. if it is, then yes, it does extend to a woman not being forced to care for her child. thats why we have adoption. to answer to why not, the woman may feel she is not capable to care for a child, plain and simple. as far as the moral aspect, i would say it has to differ from person to person. i personally have no problem with adoption. many times its the best case for the child. im really not sure what you mean by the last part of that quote. what reserves the responsibility? the idea that a woman would not be able to abort? im pro choice so im saying they should be able to.

im kinda confused...

im not talking of a situation like that though, its totally a hypothetical. im sure a case has never existed.

so lets pose the doctor finds a gene in a mother where he finds the baby over consumes while growing, and within a month if the baby is still inside the mother, both will die, the mother from malnutrition and baby eating the mother after all the nutrition was consumed, and the baby having nothing left to feed on and grow.

or lets say the mother has no clotting agent in her blood. she is told to birth the child she must have a c section, but there is no blood to transfuse that matches her blood type. so if there is a c section she will die. and for some reason if the baby is born any other way then naturally it will die.

obv these are extreme examples, and likely will never have anything like that happen. but it makes me mad when people put absolutes on things on life.

you think its wrong to kill a person, but what will you do when he holds a gun to your head? do you kill?

what about stealing? you think its wrong to steal, but you are faced with a situation where you can not work, have no money and your only option is to steal food from a store to survive. do you steal the food?

there are countless scenarios we can come up with where 99.9% of the time someone may not perform an act but under the correct circumstance they would likely perform that act. in the kill and steal scenarios i posed, i think survival instinct would step in and take over. its not that one necessarily agrees with the action, but instinctively they know its the best choice.



to further beg the question, lets think about the baby and mother dying scenario. but this time lets say we know the baby will live if it born but the mother will die, so there will be life one way or the other. no matter what you do you are condemning one. im not saying the baby doesnt have as much right to live as the mother, thats not the point. i just do not think you could offer someone a death sentence like that. a rebuttal would say you are doing the same thing to the baby, and i say the mother is alive and has cognitive brain functions and rational thought right now. so then we get to the point of when is a fetus "alive" yadda yadda yadda.

i would be intrigued to see a pro lifer tell his wife she has to die. while they claim something now i personally do not think they would allow it to happen.

so as i said before there has to be extenuating circumstances

I struggle to understand what situation there can possibly be in which either a premature C-section or natural birth will cause both to die, but that somehow an abortion can save the mother's life.

My position here is that it seems reasonable to me that in most (if not all) cases where an abortion for medical reasons is given (specifically, the life of the mother is at risk), that there is an alternative which at least attempts to preserve the life of the child as well. If this is the case, then under the moral premise that the baby's life is worth preserving, it seems that the route which may save the baby's life should be taken.

The reason that I find this conversation to be less interesting is because my primary concern is with elective abortions. That is, abortions where there is no threat to the mother's life.

In the sense that putting up a child for adoption means transferring the care of the child to another responsible party, I don't see this as being the same as an abortion in which one absolves responsibility by killing the baby. After all, if you don't want to care for your baby, smothering it is not an acceptable way to absolve yourself of the responsibility for caring for the baby.

I know of very few people who have a moral qualm with adoption. I think you're missing the point because we're talking about the means by which one absolves responsibility.

The question is why killing should be considered an acceptable way to absolve oneself of the responsibility of caring for a child, when adoption is a perfectly reasonable route to follow that does not kill the child.

yes i understand adoption is an acceptable alternative. what about the mother who does not wish to go through the pregnancy. if we revisit the raped woman scenario, we now are placing the woman in a forced 9 month period of stress on her body. especially in a case where it was unintended, it seems unreasonable to force someone to deal with that.

heres a good scenario getting back to abortion. pregnant woman says if she does not get an abortion, she will kill her self. is it ok then? maybe in this spot the pro lifer may say yes, but its because the child is dead either way, so maybe the point would be moot, idk

If it's an empty hypothetical (meaning that there's no practical application of this), then I don't really care. It's as fruitful as asking the question of you being forced to push a button where you have to decide between killing your mom or killing your dad.

In real life, abortions are happening in cases where it is not necessary to preserve the life of the mother. This is the topic where a moral discussion has an actual meaning in terms of reality.

As for the rest of the red herrings, I'm uninterested in them. I'm not intending to lay out a moral guideline for every possible situation in which one might find oneself, for both real and purely hypothetical situations.

Moral decisions are best constructed on the basis of principles, not specific applications of those principles. I don't think "do not kill anybody ever" is a reasonable moral principle. I do think that "Preserving life is preferred over causing death" is a reasonable moral principle.

i think you are viewing this as a child goes up for adoption, it is adopted. i think i read it as the child is up for adoption, but may end in foster care, or in a situation that is less then ideal.

the morality aspect wasnt directed toward adoption being moral. it was directed to mothers who want to give up their children for any reason they see fit, and i said the morality would differ from person to person as for that being a moral dilemma. im sure that was tough to understand from what i wrote, the ideas pop into my head and i just kinda type them out, so sorry for any confusion there.

and i think using the adoption argument, while viable, has plenty of counters, one being the large amount of children available for adoption around the world today. we already have a population problem. adding more just leads to a higher exponential growth. so while their may be moral factors associated with abortion, they are also socio-economic factors to consider too, if we are really getting this in depth with the topic, as we are.

I never said that the choice between the two is a choice between a nice scenario and a not-nice scenario. It seems unreasonable to kill someone just because that person is somehow "inconvenient" to someone else.

I find it odd that in elective abortions that the principle of "I don't want this" is viewed as being a higher priority than "life is worth protecting." Once again, I'll follow this to its post-birth conclusion: if a woman doesn't want her child 1 day, 1 year, or even 10 years after its born, killing the child isn't an option. So there's a different moral principle in play that is overriding the personal feeling of "I don't want this." I'm asking you to identify the shift in moral responsibility from "Killing is an acceptable means of absolving oneself of the responsibility of caring for the child" to "Killing is NOT an acceptable means of absolving oneself of the responsibility of caring for the child."

What if a woman has two kids, and threatens to kill both unless you kill one of them for her. Do you kill one of the kids or let her kill both? Neither. There are other options and other ways to maneuver through the situation. This is quite clearly a false choice.

and as i eluded to in my last response, if every child that was ever aborted had been alive, we would have such an exponential growth in the population and drain on our resources.

ive thought of this in many other scenarios, and i wrote a disclaimer in a thread i said this in in the past, where i do not condone or agree with any of it, but i am merely just stating a fact. think about wars, and how many people lose their life, think about terrible atrocities like the holocaust, or any large scale mass killings. these are absolutely horrible and should never have happened, but if they hadn't where would our world be today. would that many more people have helped to decimate many of our natural resources? i could ask a hundred different questions on "what about ___" here, but im sure you see the point.

im not saying we need to have abortions for this purpose but every action has a reaction. just because that one life has been lost, you may actually be saving countless others. our resources are finite. they will run out some day. the larger the population, the quicker this happens.

We're not talking about "ideal." We're talking about the moral dilemma that you've presented.

I'm pretty sure you haven't thought through this very carefully. If you really want to engage in a conversation, you should really put the time in to consider your positions thoughtfully, and not just reactively. Because you're quite clearly missing the point.

Your logic here could be used to justify exterminating the kids in the foster care system (say, if they're not adopted after a month, like what they do in the dog pound). The economic savings would be huge. And we'd be reducing the human population "problem."

wait, what? how. you only have 2 options. if there is another option, then you have to say it in the question. so it should read kill one, let her kill both or do something else where neither of those scenarios happen. you cant just do neither and say no one dies.

If this is really where you want to go, then the conversation has run its course. You are clearly only interested in presenting a position, and not willing to attempt to justify it with an argument. And when pressed, you are very plainly avoiding the question by introducing other random assertions. I'm as interested in your hand-wavings about morality as I am with superjeff's made up statistics.

In real life, people are choosing to kill their children on the basis of personal inconvenience. And people (such as yourself) are advocating that this is a morally acceptable decision. But when pressed to consider the reality of the situation, people (such as yourself) throw up a smoke screen that allows them to avoid the reality by talking about empty hypothetical situations and false choices.

I'm asking you again to discuss the reality of abortions and the decision factors that allow one to decide that it is morally acceptable to destroy another life on the basis of inconvenience. If you don't want to do that, it's fine. I can't force you to do it. But your inability to do it is a strong indication of the depth to which you've considered your moral position. And I think it would behoove you as a person to take the time to actually think about it in the context of reality.

Because I think you're unclear as to what I'm saying here:

In any realistic scenario, we are not actually constrained to precisely these two outcomes as expressed by the mother. If this were to happen in reality, someone would be given the responsibility of talking to the mother in an attempt to talk her down from her position (to allow her to create another alternative). In some situations, they might attempt to kill the mother before she kills the children. They might raid the location and attempt to restrain the mother while rescuing the children. There are other routes to pursue other than playing the game that the mother has presented.

so its an unrealistic situation, as you deemed mine, so why bring it up if you only want to deal with realistic situations?

either my hypotheticals stand, or retract this one. even if if you do not its still fairly moot. you say we have 2 options, then when we are asked which one we choose we now have a million options, so the argument is really that we have a million options, which makes the scenario and question pointless

i do not have a moral dilemma with abortion, regardless of reasoning. i feel an unborn fetus does not have these rights. call it immoral on me or what have you but its how i feel. i do agree that a 9 month fetus is different then a 2 week fetus. we get into a sticky spot here where its a personal opinion to what does and does not have rights. but this is also why there are laws governing what time frame is appropriate to perform an abortion

if you are seriously anti abortion in every way shape and form, then you must feel that aborting a 2 week fetus is unethical. which if you feel that way, then fine, thats your choice and i respect it. do you have any cut off? if we get to a point medically where pregnancy hormones can be detected in a woman in 24 hours and the abortion can be done then is there a problem. if it is still unethical then fine i respect your opinion. as long as you do not play the it is cognitive life at this point and so it has the right to live, because it would be nothing more the a few expanding cells, void of any rational thought or self awareness.

my morality on the situation is more structured toward the woman here. i do not think it is morally acceptable to force a woman to endure something for 9 months she has no desire to. i feel the most strong in the situations where it is a conception due to rape. imo the woman has more rights the the fetus.

if you are from the US, everyone has the unalienable right to life liberty and the pursuit of happiness. you can say if this is true then the fetus has this right too. but in actuality not everyone has this right. some people who murder people in this country do not have that right. they are sentenced to death based on some states laws. so there are extenuating circumstances in almost every life situation where everything we know and what we feel may change based on a circumstance. i would not want to alienate anyone from these rights, however if you murder someone who have forfeited these rights.

thats a whole different topic though.

but i have considered abortion on a moral level and i do not have a problem with it.

The point was to create a hypothetical that more obviously demonstrated the false choice. It was supposed be at an LDO level of obviousness that it was a false choice. Maybe it was so obvious that you thought there was something else to it.

I barely want to read past this point because it's an indication that what is to follow is some nonsense rambling that is a mile wide and an inch deep in terms of content.

In three sentences, you've made three assertions, but have not provided even an ounce of reasoning to begin to explain or justify your position.

1) Why do you feel that an unborn fetus does not have "these rights"? (What are "these rights"?)
2) Why do you agree that a 9 month fetus is different from a 2 week fetus?
3) Why is this all a matter of opinion? If it's in my opinion that you should be shot, then is it still just a matter of opinion whether I'm morally justified in exerting my preference? (Note: I'm not concerned about legal ramifications -- I'm talking specifically about moral justification.)

4) Are you saying that the laws define morality?

5) If she has a child and at the age of 1 decides that she doesn't have the desire to continue raising the child, and it takes 9 months for the adoption process to be completed, does she have the moral authority to simply stop caring for the child because it has reached the 9 month threshold that she would have to endure?

Given what you've written, I have serious doubts that you've done more than take a cursory glance at the topic. You just feel this way and that's the extent to which you've delved into it. The position of a moral relativist is very difficult to justify, defend, and explain once you get past the superficial issues that are always answered "whatever works for you."

i think i will end this here because it seems you are begging me to say i have not studied the topic as in depth as you may here, and thus discredit my opinion.

where did i allude to a mother having a child then if cant give it up in 9 months for adoption she has no duty to the child. please do not twist my words. its a totally different situation and has about the same logical strong hold as saying well since i am carniverous i will eat humans. just because i make one statement about something does not hold it true for every possible scenario. is this not a straw man??? i said if a woman was impregnated against her will she should not be forced to bear the child, and the 9 months of pregnancy and complications to go with it. or are you just attacking the way i worded it rhetorically... (one can only hope)

in part 2, a 9 month old fetus has the capability of living outside of the mother, where a 2 week old fetus will not survive. they are not equivalent.
part 3 is pointless because its a matter of opinion. just because its my opinion doesnt mean im forcing that opinion on anyone who does not want it. you cant use the fetus as an example because it is not capable of rational thought imo. your opinion would be forcing something on to me. im not forcing anyone to get an abortion. the argument is not synonymous when all implications are considered.
part 4, quite the contrary. the morality defines the laws. which is why if you felt that i should be shot, you would be in the minority and we have laws to protect against that thought. you can act on it with consequence, but you obv are entitled to your opinion.

meh w/e gg

I'm pointing out that you're using ad hoc reasons. When you talked about the immorality of bearing the child, your ONLY justification you presented was "9 months":

I quite sure that this isn't the only reason you have for thinking that this is immoral, nor is it the central reason. But that is the reason you used to support your position! "It's immoral to force a woman to endure something for 9 months if she does not desire to do so."

I think this is quite clearly showing that the position you've articulated is not particularly well-reasoned. In fact, my whole point in engaging this conversation to you was to help you to see how poorly reasoned of a position you're putting forth. As I stated before, I'm not actually trying to convince you of the immorality of abortion. I've stated my goals before:

----

Finally, we're getting somewhere. So there's something about self-sufficiency and the "outside world" that matters to you.

Somewhere in here, you're making some sort of claim along the lines of minimalist ethics and that it's generally moral to exert one's "opinion" if the object is "not capable of rational thought." That would get weird and difficult with respect to animal cruelty, but that's a completely different topic.

Uhhhh... yeah. You have clearly missed the boat on the question of moral justification.

Edit:

This is precisely the attitude that has taken you to your current state of moral comprehension.