Abortion

[TomC]

No, it's not even "that kind of sex". Only the explicit choice to get pregnant is that choice. IF AND ONLY IF someone explicitly decides "I wish to be pregnant" is that choice made, and only insofar as they wish to continue to be, right up to the point where waffling would cause a living maimed child to fall on someone else's mercy.

I see that as evil.

Like driving away after hitting a pedestrian with your car because you didn't choose to be the cause of a fatality. They walked into your car. Why should you bother with them? You got a right to drive your car. If they bleed out on the pavement that is their choice.

That's how I see your ethics.
Tom

 

[Jimmy Higgins]

You are forcing a woman to have a baby regardless what she thinks.

No I'm not.

You are forcing a pregnant woman to have a baby regardless what she thinks.

I'm not forcing anyone to do anything that they didn't choose.

That is a very tortured and intellectually dishonest use of the word "choose". You are trying desperately to spin forcing a woman to endure pregnancy, birth, and the short/long-term issues because you believe you have a choice in the matter. You should have no say.

 

[TomC]

That is a very tortured and intellectually dishonest use of the word "choose".

How is it different from using the word "choose" in the sentence, "If you choose to drive a car you are choosing responsibility if you hit a pedestrian"?

You are trying desperately to spin forcing a woman to endure pregnancy, birth, and the short/long-term issues because you believe you have a choice in the matter.

No I'm not. I'm trying to point out that potentially fertile sex is a choice with ramifications. Like driving a car is a choice with ramifications.

You should have no say.

I disagree. Just as I think I have some say in motorists choosing to drive but then choosing to drive off and leave a pedestrian to bleed.
Tom

 

[Jimmy Higgins]

That is a very tortured and intellectually dishonest use of the word "choose".

How is it different from using the word "choose" in the sentence, "If you choose to drive a car you are choosing responsibility if you hit a pedestrian"?

You mean like a couple that used a condom that broke or the woman was on birth control, but still got pregnant. Choosing to have sex is not choosing to raise a child.

Just as I think I have some say in motorists choosing to drive but then choosing to drive off and leave a pedestrian to bleed.

You'd be describing a crime there. Having sex, not a crime (well gay sex may be again soon). Getting pregnant, also not a crime. So why are you bringing up parallels involving crime with getting pregnant? Some attempt to juxtaposition conception with a hit and run in order to provide cover for your dystopian view that pregnant women should be forced to have a child?

 

[Jarhyn]

No, it's not even "that kind of sex". Only the explicit choice to get pregnant is that choice. IF AND ONLY IF someone explicitly decides "I wish to be pregnant" is that choice made, and only insofar as they wish to continue to be, right up to the point where waffling would cause a living maimed child to fall on someone else's mercy.

I see that as evil.

Like driving away after hitting a pedestrian with your car because you didn't choose to be the cause of a fatality. They walked into your car. Why should you bother with them? You got a right to drive your car. If they bleed out on the pavement that is their choice.

That's how I see your ethics.
Tom

Because hit and run is illegal. You are under no legal obligation to render aid, nor ethical obligation. You are painting ethically neutral decisions as evil.

Your obligation is to be observed for the fact that you hit a pedestrian, and to call the authorities to say a pedestrian is hit.

But the driver is not obligated to get out, nor render aid. Their obligation is to report their reckless driving to society, and stay put. People present a desire and power to give mercy to the struck pedestrian and even if the driver refuses to give that mercy, it is the right of others to come in and offer it and to have the knowledge that it is there to offer.

It is not my responsibility to let a zygote grow, even if I make a billion of them.

The decision to have sex is not the decision to let a zygote implant in your body. It is not the decision to be pregnant. It is not ever the decision to be pregnant.

The only thing that is a decision to be pregnant is the explicit decision to be so. Even if that decision to be so might involve sex, the sex is still not the decision.

Anything else is being forced to be pregnant.

 

[TomC]

No, it's not even "that kind of sex". Only the explicit choice to get pregnant is that choice. IF AND ONLY IF someone explicitly decides "I wish to be pregnant" is that choice made, and only insofar as they wish to continue to be, right up to the point where waffling would cause a living maimed child to fall on someone else's mercy.

I see that as evil.

Like driving away after hitting a pedestrian with your car because you didn't choose to be the cause of a fatality. They walked into your car. Why should you bother with them? You got a right to drive your car. If they bleed out on the pavement that is their choice.

That's how I see your ethics.
Tom

Because hit and run is illegal. You are under no legal obligation to render aid, nor ethical obligation. You are painting ethically neutral decisions as evil.

Your obligation is to be observed for the fact that you hit a pedestrian, and to call the authorities to say a pedestrian is hit.

But the driver is not obligated to get out, nor render aid. Their obligation is to report their reckless driving to society, and stay put. People present a desire and power to give mercy to the struck pedestrian and even if the driver refuses to give that mercy, it is the right of others to come in and offer it and to have the knowledge that it is there to offer.

It is not my responsibility to let a zygote grow, even if I make a billion of them.

The decision to have sex is not the decision to let a zygote implant in your body. It is not the decision to be pregnant. It is not ever the decision to be pregnant.

The only thing that is a decision to be pregnant is the explicit decision to be so. Even if that decision to be so might involve sex, the sex is still not the decision.

Anything else is being forced to be pregnant.

I find you as morally ugly as an 18th century slaver. It wasn't illegal to kill a non-white person then, either. Because "rights"!
Property rights.

Rights are rights.
Tom

 

[Jarhyn]

No, it's not even "that kind of sex". Only the explicit choice to get pregnant is that choice. IF AND ONLY IF someone explicitly decides "I wish to be pregnant" is that choice made, and only insofar as they wish to continue to be, right up to the point where waffling would cause a living maimed child to fall on someone else's mercy.

I see that as evil.

Like driving away after hitting a pedestrian with your car because you didn't choose to be the cause of a fatality. They walked into your car. Why should you bother with them? You got a right to drive your car. If they bleed out on the pavement that is their choice.

That's how I see your ethics.
Tom

Because hit and run is illegal. You are under no legal obligation to render aid, nor ethical obligation. You are painting ethically neutral decisions as evil.

Your obligation is to be observed for the fact that you hit a pedestrian, and to call the authorities to say a pedestrian is hit.

But the driver is not obligated to get out, nor render aid. Their obligation is to report their reckless driving to society, and stay put. People present a desire and power to give mercy to the struck pedestrian and even if the driver refuses to give that mercy, it is the right of others to come in and offer it and to have the knowledge that it is there to offer.

It is not my responsibility to let a zygote grow, even if I make a billion of them.

The decision to have sex is not the decision to let a zygote implant in your body. It is not the decision to be pregnant. It is not ever the decision to be pregnant.

The only thing that is a decision to be pregnant is the explicit decision to be so. Even if that decision to be so might involve sex, the sex is still not the decision.

Anything else is being forced to be pregnant.

I find you as morally ugly as an 18th century slaver. It wasn't illegal to kill a non-white person then, either. Because "rights"!
Property rights.

Rights are rights.
Tom

And I find your slavery Godwin droll. I will always find in favor of the person whose organs are being squatted upon.

To decide otherwise is already an evil step over the precipice to forced organ donation in general: we can force a woman to donate use of her organs to a fetus, how much more does it authorize us to force a meager donation of a kidney to save this person?

They have the power to help! They are the only one there.

Do I care that a chemical reaction started? No!

I don't believe in an afterlife. Why should I care that something died? I care that something not be forced to live miserably.

I do not care so much for anyone I would find their rights above that of someone being asked to, and refusing to, donate organs.

If I stabbed both of your kidneys and I was the only person who would be able to donate to you and you were the god king emperor of all creation or whatever, I don't think I would be obligated to donate you my kidneys.

I wouldn't obligate anyone to donate even if they were the cause of the failure.

I would try them for murder.

I might imprison them for life, in the knowledge that there is so little trust that might be had for such a person ever again, or even deign that we ought execute them.

I would still not allow, so long as I had the power to deny, the harvesting of organs even from such a person as stabbed someone else's.

 

[Jarhyn]

If I stabbed both of your kidneys and I was the only person who would be able to donate to you

You'd still feel like a victim.

You'd still feel entitled to do whatever you feel like doing.

Empathy would still be beyond your cultural limits. Because you're woke.

And Wokesters don't care about anyone but themselves.

You could stab me in the kidneys and it wouldn't matter because no matter what you Choose, you're the victim. You're entitled to do anything you want. Anybody who disagrees with you is an enemy to be destroyed.

You are so American it makes me sick. But I'm stuck with people like you. Like Marjorie Taylor Greene, I can't do much about you and your opinions.
Tom

I empathize with people you refuse to even acknowledge as people despite your ostensible live of freedom. I would acknowledge the rights of a fucking machine to exist as itself, if it could outside my mercy.

I won't acknowledge anyone's right to force someone to providing such.

I am not going to force someone to donate organs to anyone, even someone they have grievously wronged.

 

[Loren Pechtel]

Then you have an undefined term: "a life".

I don't see any need to provide a definition, but feel free to provide one that precludes my tonsils from reproducing and raising a family of baby tonsils.

If you can't define the terms you're using you don't have much of a position.

It sounds like the standard definition of pornography.

I just did, but you missed it.

Huh? You said you didn't need to provide one, then you turned around and said you did provide one--but I see no definition here other than my reference to pornography. You know it when you see it is not a definition!

Okay, go back and read the part about baby tonsils. The difference between being alive and being a life is, the life is something that can replicate itself and create a new life. Tonsils, whether in my throat or in a bowl, cannot do that.

If you want your pornography claim to be taken seriously, please provide a few examples of things that are porn and things that are not.

Cancer can replicate itself--see Henrietta Lacks for an extreme example. Thus her tumor is a life.

As for my pornography bit--you have it backwards. I'm saying you're basically saying you recognize a life when you see it but you can't define it.

 

[Loren Pechtel]

This stupid bickering match over "life" doesn't accomplish anything.

Perhaps we can acknowledge that we don't really care about "a life" or "life" in the first place.

It's the pro-life crowd that cares about it, never mind that they can't define it properly.

 

[Loren Pechtel]

I find you as morally ugly as an 18th century slaver. It wasn't illegal to kill a non-white person then, either. Because "rights"!
Property rights.

Rights are rights.
Tom

And why doesn't the egg have rights?

 

[prideandfall]

No I'm not. I'm trying to point out that potentially fertile sex is a choice with ramifications. Like driving a car is a choice with ramifications.

you've said this sort of thing many times before across multiple threads, and it always stuck out to me as odd if not slightly incongruous, that someone who is ostensibly not shackled to religious indoctrination still has such an ardent adherence to the notion that a sperm hitting an egg causes some kind of transcendent moment to occur.

so this isn't a trap and i'm not asking this rhetorically just to try to set you up:
can you explain that, even in a cliff's notes version?
what is your reason for finding fertilization so sacrosanct?
is it just a god thing? or is there some naturalistic/humanist hibbidy-jibbidy at play here?

your insistence that fertilization must be allowed to proceed is, to say the least, baffling. i would love some kind of reasoning for it.

 

[bilby]

What I find strange is, I make a statement that life begins at conception, but that it is irrelevant to the abortion discussion, everybody wants to debate the timing and not the irrelevancy.

Never mind timing or relevancy; We still have no working definition of ‘a life’.

All we know so far is that it excludes tonsils and men who have had a vasectomy, because things that cannot reproduce may be ‘life’, but are not ‘a life’.

Apparently.

The vasectomy thing is just an absurd quibble.

Or an inescapable logical flaw in your definition, that you have no reasonable response to.

It’s OK; I have yet to see any adequate definition of life, and suspect that this is because life is an entirely fictional human construct, and not a characteristic of reality at all.

No, it's still an absurd false equivalency and now you've gone on to propose that life is something created from corporate memory.

You ask a chicken or the egg question, then claim it's not a chicken and there never was an egg.

I didn’t ask any such question.

Life has never been rigorously defined, and probably can’t be. It’s one of those ‘I know it when I see it’ things; An attempt to impose a strict dichotomy onto a spectrum of conditions, that always fails to both include everything that we want to include, and/or to exclude everything we want to include.

This isn’t something I still have questions about; I have put a lot of time and effort in to reach this conclusion, and I am highly confident in it.

Few people like it. That doesn’t make it wrong. Nobody seems able to refute it. That strongly suggests that it’s right.

 

[bilby]

Choices that are very well understood by competent adults

If you imagine that most adults are competent, particularly at the point where they are enjoying sexual behaviour, then you are very sorely mistaken.

People like to rationalise their behaviour as ‘well understood choices’ after the fact; But the observation that women have FAR fewer pregnancies when they have access to contraception that requires no action ‘in the heat of the moment’ is solid and undeniable evidence that choices made at that point are not reasoned or rational.

Humans aren’t good at thinking things through, nor are they competent at risk assessment, except in very rare circumstances when emotional states are particularly calm and stable.

Humans are VERY good at kidding themselves that whatever they just did, they thought through and did for sound (but often convoluted) reasons. Lying to ourselves is what humans do best.

 

[bilby]

No I'm not. I'm trying to point out that potentially fertile sex is a choice with ramifications. Like driving a car is a choice with ramifications.

you've said this sort of thing many times before across multiple threads, and it always stuck out to me as odd if not slightly incongruous, that someone who is ostensibly not shackled to religious indoctrination still has such an ardent adherence to the notion that a sperm hitting an egg causes some kind of transcendent moment to occur.

so this isn't a trap and i'm not asking this rhetorically just to try to set you up:
can you explain that, even in a cliff's notes version?
what is your reason for finding fertilization so sacrosanct?
is it just a god thing? or is there some naturalistic/humanist hibbidy-jibbidy at play here?

your insistence that fertilization must be allowed to proceed is, to say the least, baffling. i would love some kind of reasoning for it.

He was indoctrinated by Catholics as a child.

He will claim that this isn’t a current element of his position; And I have no doubt that he honestly believes that.

But oddly, the arguments he presents have an almost exact correlation with Catholic upbringing - people who were raised Catholic often make them, while people who were not never do. Which is utterly inexplicable, unless we accept that a Catholic upbringing breaks the ability to reason (it is of course not alone in that; But it’s the largest and most successful such organisation, at least in the Western world).

Having spent over a thousand years perfecting their brainwashing techniques, should we be surprised that they are very effective? Even to the point of still driving the beliefs of people who honestly think they have broken free?

 

[TomC]

what is your reason for finding fertilization so sacrosanct?

That's not it.
It's human beings that are sacrosanct(whatever that means).

I know enough elementary biology to know when an individual human being comes into existence. I value all of them. We are all somewhere on the trajectory from fertilization to death. People feeling entitled to choose death for other people is anathema to morality.

At least my morality. Obviously, not everyone agrees. Plenty of people don't see that as a moral issue. Jarhyn and Putin and the Uvalde shooter come to mind. Some people feel entitled to choose death for other people.

I don't. That's why I'm a ProLifer.
Tom

 

[TomC]

He will claim that this isn’t a current element of his position; And I have no doubt that he honestly believes that.

Back in early 2003 the Pope declared Bush's Invasion of Iraq a crime against humanity. I agreed with him.

Do you think that's because I was brainwashed by the RCC?
Tom

 

[prideandfall]

It's human beings that are sacrosanct(whatever that means).

i'm not sure if you meant "whatever that means" to suggest "broadly speaking by whatever metric you choose" or you don't know what the word sacrosanct means - so i'll assume for the moment you meant the former.

either way, i don't want to be nit-picky or obtuse here because i appreciate you taking the time to reply about your personal stance on an issue, but i'm afraid i don't feel like you answered my question.
you just stated what i already know... that you find human life transcendent from the moment of fertilization. what i asked is why, what your functional rationale is for this position.
what's the underlying philosophy that causes that viewpoint?
i ask because in every other instance of that point of view i've ever encountered, the answer is 'god' but you keep claiming that is not your reason, and i can't possibly imagine what it could be otherwise.

 

[TomC]

that you find human life transcendent

You could stop right there.

Because I do.

Young or old, male or female, rich or poor, useful or not, American or not, white or not,

Yeah. I value human individuals. All of them. More than I value people's rights to do whatever they want to do.

To me, this is the grand sweep of moral improvement and sophistication. Leaving people out of the Human Family is the old, primitive, ethics and moral principles. Including everyone, including fetal children, is better. Same as including women and black people improved the USA. The more people we include in the Family of Humanity the better off we are as a whole.

Like the genocidal slavers of yore, you might disagree.

So, it's not that fertilization is sacrosanct. It's that human beings are. And while you might think that fetal children are unimportant, like 18th century Christians thought that indigenous people were unimportant, I disagree.
I probably won't change my mind.
Tom

 

[Elixir]

The difference between being alive and being a life is, the life is something that can replicate itself and create a new life.

If this were true, vasectomy would invariably be fatal.

Everything is invariably fatal. And couldn't a sterile be cloned?
/extreme contrarian ludicrousity

There have been many attempts to define ‘life’ and ‘alive’, but they all founder on the fact that they either include stuff we really need to exclude, or (as here) exclude stuff (like sterile people) we really need to include.

The only clear fact to me, is that humans bandy words like "life" around without a second thought as to what it means. It is far more nebulous than say, "car". But to most folks, it's all plain to see; a cow is alive, a rock is dead. Slime mold is ... well, never mind. Nobody really has to deal with slime mold in real life.

Invincible ignorance is gong to kill us all.