Why is late term abortion being repeatedly mentioned? I've never heard of a medical provider who would perform a late term abortion unless it was either to save the life of the mother, or to remove a nonviable fetus.
This is a philosophy forum, where odd questions are supposed to be analyzed with some attempt at rationality. It's clear from their comments that a number of participants here are not interested in doing that, and apparently think this is nothing more than a political forum where odd questions that if pursued might lead to interesting new insights should be answered with character assassination in the service of suppressing dissent.
But you ask a good question, and I take it that unlike the others, you're actually interested in finding out the answer. Here ya go.
Exhibit A:
You have been answered clearly many times.
I'll restate the OP.
Is there any difference between aborting a fetus just before normal birth(late term abortion) and terminating a baby after delivery and the cord is cut?
Yes.
It is not about the majority of abortions or anything else. It is not about the legality of abortion. It is not about the social value of abortion.
It is about what you personally think is right or wrong.
No, it is about whether there is an objective difference.
The answer is YES.
In one case there are the rights of two people involved and they may be in conflict.
In the other case there is only one person involved and there is no conflict.
^^^^ That ^^^^ is why late term abortion is being repeatedly mentioned.
[ Still talking to SoHy here. ]
Nobody approaches the myriad different abortion questions in a theoretical vacuum. We judge each specific abortion question based on our personal moral senses and based on whatever overall moral theories we've settled on in our respective attempts to make our own moral senses make sense to us. The one Rhea proposes here is among the more popular of such theories. She is advancing the theory that a fetus a few days before normal delivery is not a person.
If it is true that a fetus a few days before normal delivery is not a person, then it follows that it would have no right not to be aborted
even if there were no medical issues and even if the abortion were a matter of convenience. It follows, therefore, that
if it's immoral to abort a viable healthy fetus a few days before normal delivery for the sake of convenience when it's medically unnecessary,
then Rhea's moral theory is incorrect. This is a matter of logic; the circumstance that nobody ever does what Steve describes is completely immaterial to the correctness of the argument. What Steve is doing here is subjecting Rhea's moral theory to the intellectual test of whether it gives right answers in "corner cases".
That's the normal way we falsify theories. Did we falsify Newton's Theory of Gravity by considering only what we see every day? If we accepted theories based on only the evidence of whether they fit everyday experience we'd have a hundred mutually contradictory theories and no way to settle which is right besides shouting at one other.
If our moral senses tell us a fetus a few days before normal delivery is a person and does have a right not to be aborted for the sake of convenience when there's no medical issue, and we deduce that Rhea's moral theory is wrong, that has an implication for real-world abortion questions far beyond the hypothetical corner case that helped us reach that conclusion. For example, what it implies about aborting a pre-viable five-months-along fetus is that we can dismiss any argument of the form "It's okay to abort because it's not a person until birth." That doesn't mean we can dismiss an argument that says "It's okay to abort because her womb, her choice.". It doesn't even mean we can dismiss an argument that says "It's okay to abort because it's not a person.", but it does mean that replying to the latter argument with "At what point does it become a person?" is a fair question. Steve's question is a good one because it helps us to narrow down the set of arguments we need to take seriously when we're trying to come up with a rational moral theory that won't conflict with our moral senses.
Steve is doing philosophy at its finest. That's what we're all supposed to be here for. Anyone not up for that kind of a discussion can go back to PD, where not having standards of evidence seems to be widely considered a point of honor. Don't let the door hit your ass on the way out.
The RED HERRING is you trying to construct a question where you feel morally permitted to ignore the human rights of a live adult human, and ask for a yes-or-no so that you can avoid admitting that you don’t want to talk about the rights of the live and adult human.
At no point did Steve imply in any way that the mother's rights don't matter. And he already de facto stipulated that the mother's rights matter too when he wrote "The new state laws set an impossible lower bound of pregnancy detection." Rhea is strawmanning him.
Because you somehow feel empowered to deny her rights and that is so trivial to you that you’d like to just hand-wave it away.
YES there is a moral difference between a situation where two humans have conflicting rights and a situation with only one human.
That you choose to pretend that is not the conversation says a lot about how you view women.
That Rhea chooses to treat this as a "Let's slander Steve because he's a heretic." forum says a lot about how she views freethought.
