@chezlaw

This is what I'm saying.

I guess I went too far in branding DoorDoNot as some kind of radical.
I apologize.
Roe vs Wade, as I'm sure all of you know, was based on the right to privacy. Under the due process clause in the 14th amendment.
It did not make a final conclusion as to weather a fetus is a human or not.
That's what my argument was based on. That a woman has the freedom to choose what happens to her body. Only she has the right of Consent.
Wether or not a fetus is human is a whole other argument.
I argue, once again and for the last time, that that's irrelevant.
It doesn't matter. The law says, a woman has the right to an abortion if she so chooses. In no way then can a woman choosing to have an abortion, can it be murder under current law.
If a woman chooses to kill herself( I hope I'm not opening a can of worms with this), it's suicide and not murder. If someone else decides to kill same woman, it's murder and not suicide.
It seems to me, Doordonot, wants to have his cake and eat it too.
Naughty boy.

Yes and if we stop calling it murder then the semantic problems go away. Nothing else changes. It's a heinous act against the woman if forced. Not a heinous act against the woman if it isn't.

Roe claimed the state had a right to protect the unborn from their mothers in the third trimester. Does a woman's right to privacy go away in the third trimester? Obviously not. The ruling is really about when the states interest supersede privacy rights and not that women had the right to privacy.

I don't see a semantic problem. Murder is a legal term not a moral one. It means the unlawful killing of a human being. Abortion is legal killing. Its not murder. There is a inconsistency or "problem" in the law that allows one party to kill its prenatal offspring but not the other.

Hm. I agree that at some point the fetus evolves into a human being.
I none the less have no moral qualms with abortion.
We can all argue that the woman's egg is a human being and every time she menstruates, she's killing her baby. There is no definitive answer in our opinion.
Is it morally right for someone to force you to have a baby and then abandon you? The people who seem to argue vehemently for the so called right to life are also the same people who are the most against any type of a social support system.
The true reason they are so much against abortion is their utter fear of becoming a minority in this country. White women, in their eyes, shouldn't be allowed to have abortions because we need more white babys.
This is what the whole so called moral outrage of the radical right is really all about.

You could make an argument, but it wouldn't be a good one. The basic life cycle of animals is pretty well understood and has been for a long time. Egg and sperm are just components that go into the production of a new human being. A functioning egg, by itself will always remain an egg. A functioning sperm by itself will always remain a sperm. A functioning embryo undergoes at least some development toward a human adult even if conception occurred in a petri dish.

The mistake is equating a bunch of cells to a person. Unless you're invoking 'souls' in which case it's a discussion for RGT


If the law doesn't make clear that any crime is against the women then the law is being a arse.

The only thing equating a bunch of cells to a person in this thread is the court when it convicts people other than the pregnant woman or her doctor of committing murder when they kill a fetus.


So it cant be murder then.

I tend not to consider person hood when thinking about morality because it is such a nebulous transitory term. Are sleeping humans persons? Is an adult under general anesthesia a person? What about the frozen astronauts that HAL 9000 killed on the Discovery One? Were they persons or just a bunch of cells? Suppose Dave 3d printed an exact replica of down to every cell and neuron connection of one of the frozen astronauts. Would it be okay for Hal to destroy a bunch of frozen cells that have never been sentient even though that bunch is identical to one that has?

person != human being

There is not much dispute about what a human being is. The only reason I see to use person instead of human being when determining what is moral is to justify things like abortion. If I am going to do that, I might as well make up my morals on my whims.

I wouldn't call it murder but to the victim it's tantamount to murdering their child so how big a deal is the semantic point?

Same for human being as person.

A human being may be a bunch of cells but that doesn't mean a bunch of cells is a human being

Foolishness, you cannot even begin to speak to life or viability or sensibility without "thinking" which will lead you to the "soul" . Otherwise you can only speak to the corpse of a man which should certainly give you pause as to just what you are saying.

The deflection to another land is an appeal to ignorance or a dismissiveness which in the modern age has replaced cogent conversation.

The question of "life" calls for a "scientific" approach to that which is not material, or the ability to think, which is a supersensible process and not obtunded within weights and measures which only speaks to space . Its in the right place , preconceptions have to be released and "see" as to whether it is comprehensible but certainly not within inches and pounds.

The scientist in our modern times can only speak to the fetus being alive at the moment of breath . The scientific cloak cannot and does not sp[eak to the "life within" for as mentioned earlier he speaks to weights, measurements or the mineral.

Now, individual scientists can pass judgment upon the nature of the fetus but in the end the official science , by its nature, can only speak to viability at birth and taking the first breath.

The scientific cloak spreads far and wide and many , without portfolio, assume the cloak of invincibility and state implicitly or explicitly " its scientifically proven" not realizing that they are no more than a tethered slave to a dogmatic ideology, the ideology of science or better the materialistic science.

Previously it was "dogmatic religion " and is now "dogmatic science". This is not to say that it is an aberration within the evolution of Man but men do bring forth this dogmatism and the scientists true work is to free himself and Man, as individual, from the throes of a moribund matter.

The expression is: "my brain, my heart, my foot, my...etc.." and if one speaks the possessive in these matters who exactly is the "my"' who is this man ? Is he the brain, is he the heart, is he the foot ,...???

Well, using that approach, a sperm is a stage of the same developmental course, so I guess we are at the “Monty Python” stage of the topic?

The semantic difficulty seems to be yours here. Is it legally murder? Because the courts have found that it is, which is inconsistent with how the courts view the fetus with respect to abortion.

Courts are often stupid. As long as the results reflect the gravity of the crime in one case and the lack of any crime in the other then that's not bad for a US court

In the uk we dont call it murder. Nor in some other places.

Unless you're arguing the results are wrong i.e forced abortion should be legal or regular abortion is murder then what are we arguing about?

Forced abortion shouldn't be legal, it just shouldn't be murder, OR all abortions are murders.

Well then it isn't murder so that fine. The us courts are wrong on that but get the right result. I'd rather they were inconsistent but right than were consistent but wrong.

Consistent and right would be ideal but it's tough sometimes - maybe impossible overall.

An abortion is a medical procedure. When a man poisons a woman as portrayed in that partial hypothetical , no abortion occurred. Both hypothetical events end with a terminated pregnancy. One was the result of an abortion, the other the result of a man poisoning a woman. If you cut-off all information about those events but the result- ‘a terminated pregnancy’, the whole breadth of evidence is cut-off as an impetus for any laws or morals that result from such an approach.

Partial hypotheticals and results-oriented tunnel vision make for laws and morals which are partial and cut-off from the breadth of evidence available.

I demolished that argument already.

Describing the developmental process a sperm is part of in more detail helps the argument that the word fetus is not interchangeable with the word infant. Like I indicated, it takes imagination to turn a fetus into an infant while a fetus is a fetus and an infant is an infant.

I don't know what to say to this as it is word salad.

No, it’s not. So you must have some other reason to be speechless...

No seriously, your not making much sense.