Even if a fetus is not a person, abortion is still wrong.

[Eran of Arcadia]

Okay, so I am just here for the abortion debate, I am not agreeing with many of Red's contentions . . .

 

[ParkCungHee]

Removing the liver makes you die, removing a mole or fetus does not.

Not always true! Sometimes removing the liver make you live.

 

[Red Stranger]

Removing the liver makes you die, removing a mole or fetus does not.Indeed

Granted. Ok, so what's the difference between cutting your hair and removing a kidney?

 

[Perfection]

Granted. Ok, so what's the difference between cutting your hair and removing a kidney?

Quite a few:
Permanance: You can grow more hair and fetuses but not kidneys
Danger: Cutting hair and abortions are relatively safe procedures with minimal long term consequences while kidney removal can be more problematic
Mindset: Noone wants thier kidney removed except in the cases of transplants

We can do this all day.

 

[Sims2789]

A lot of the controversy of whether or not abortion should be legal revolves around the argument whether or not a fetus is a person. If it is a person, then abortion is murder. If it's not, then it's not murder. However even if it's not abortion is still wrong. For example, is an arm a person. Of course not. It's part of a person, but not a person. But does that make it right for someone to stick a coathanger in your arm every time they feel guilty about having sex? I wouldn't want that to happen to me, and I believe a majority of the people wouldn't want that to happen to them either. If someone does stick a coathanger into your arm, I hope they'd be punished for it. I don't think they should be charged with murder, but they shoudn't be let off scott free. Therefore, even if a fetus is not a person, abortion is still wrong.

Please don't talk about how there are other methods of abortion besides the coathanger. That's not the point. The point is that it's still wrong.

The coathanger is being stuck into the person's arm because of that person's choice. If that person's arm was a separate person, the person with the coathanger would be harming another person. Since it isn't a separate person, they aren't.

 

[Irish Caesar]

Fine, so because we have early cancer screenings, major surgery and chemotherapy is barbaric?

First, your logic is flawed, and second, chemotherapy is barbaric. Have you ever seen what it does to people?

The parallel is not early cancer screenings, but a way to prevent cancer. We currently do not have any cancer prevention; once we do, chemotherapy should be obsolete.

 

[ainwood]

First, your logic is flawed, and second, chemotherapy is barbaric. Have you ever seen what it does to people?

Have you mentioned this view to someone who's life has been saved by chemotherapy?

 

[Irish Caesar]

Chemotherapy saved my mom's life.

Prevention of genetic cancer would have been a better option, but as it does not yet exist, she settled for chemotherapy.

I am thankful beyond words that chemotherapy was an option, but I wish there were one that did not take such an awful toll on the body.

 

[ainwood]

I am thankful beyond words that chemotherapy was an option, but I wish there were one that did not take such an awful toll on the body.

Agreed - but chemotherapy is obviously better than the other option!

 

[Irish Caesar]

Obviously, but a treatment that wipes out the patient's hair and blood cells along with the disease and leaves one horribly vulnerable to sickness in the process has a lot of room for improvement. I have no doubt that hundreds of years from now, people will look at chemotherapy the same way we look at various wretched medieval disease treatments.

 

[Gogf]

Obviously, but a treatment that wipes out the patient's hair and blood cells along with the disease and leaves one horribly vulnerable to sickness in the process has a lot of room for improvement. I have no doubt that hundreds of years from now, people will look at chemotherapy the same way we look at various wretched medieval disease treatments.

To be fair, chemotherapy works. Most of those medieval treatments couldn't claim as much.

 

[Irish Caesar]

To be fair, chemotherapy works. Most of those medieval treatments couldn't claim as much.

While that is true (although it's not perfectly successful and often would not be as effective without surgery and radiation treatments), I still think that it will be completely obsolete in a couple hundred years if not sooner.

And now I'm done threadjacking.

 

[ParkCungHee]

First, your logic is flawed, and second, chemotherapy is barbaric. Have you ever seen what it does to people?

The parallel is not early cancer screenings, but a way to prevent cancer. We currently do not have any cancer prevention; once we do, chemotherapy should be obsolete.

The point still remains that preventative measures are nice, but don't work very well retroactively. If you some how fail to get cancer prevention, are you going to say
"I'll skip the barbaric chemo and keep my cancer thank you very much"

 

[IglooDame]

The coathanger is being stuck into the person's arm because of that person's choice. If that person's arm was a separate person, the person with the coathanger would be harming another person. Since it isn't a separate person, they aren't.

I don't think I'm going too far out on a limb on this, but that exact argument is simply dismissed by religious-right conservatives; they're the ones that still want selling of sex toys, consensual sadomasochistic activities, and assisted suicide to be illegal. "Not harming anyone but yourself" is as foreign a concept to them as "the government is not responsible for individual welfare" is to socialist liberals.

 

[El_Machinae]

Abortions are very traumatic on the female AND can cause permanent damage to her body. That is not the case with antibiotics.

Actually, many antibiotics are very hard on the body. This is why we try to avoid using them, and why we try to make better ones.

There is only a moral difference if a fetus is human. To me it seems obvious (speaking from a human rights perspective, not a religious one) that a fetus is human (in fact a zygote is human) but it is a very difficult question - perhaps not even objecively answerable - to say when a fetus is developed enough that its right to live trumps that of the mother to have an abortion.

I think that the other question is "when does a mother have the right to stop being a life-support module for her offspring?" (For the viewer, I consider a fetus to be a person once the neurons are recording environmental information; there's no reason to consider it a person before then). After birth, there is no law forcing a mother to provide dialysis for her offspring if the kidney has failed. There is no law forcing a mother to donate part of her liver (or a mole, for that matter) to her baby if it needs it. So why should a mother be forced to donate these organs before birth? For all those who do not think that birth is a magical line (including me), we have to wonder at the issue of forcing someone to be a life-support module for another and why we use birth as that 'dividing line'. There are thousands of instances where we don't force one person to provide life-support to another person, even if the original person caused the condition in the first place.

So, there are two issues. At what stage does the gamete (or its products) become a person? And at what stage may a parent abdicate responsibility, even if the responsibility is required for continued life?

 

[classical_hero]

The main reason I am against abortion is the we cannot go about deciding what is human and not because we have done this in the past by declaring that certain individual as not human to disastrous effect. We must not repeat the failure of history.

 

[Erik Mesoy]

I don't think I'm going too far out on a limb on this, but that exact argument is simply dismissed by religious-right conservatives; they're the ones that still want selling of sex toys, consensual sadomasochistic activities, and assisted suicide to be illegal. "Not harming anyone but yourself" is as foreign a concept to them as "the government is not responsible for individual welfare" is to socialist liberals.

Just to go one better, they want to make ownership of sex toys illegal too. Don't ask me how this would be enforced.

The main reason I am against abortion is the we cannot go about deciding what is human and not because we have done this in the past by declaring that certain individual as not human to disastrous effect.

Wait, I'm not sure which "certain individuals" you're referring to when you say that they were treated that way.
Iraqis?
Arabs?
Liberals?
Muslims?
Atheists?
Homosexuals?
Abortion doctors?

I can do this all day.

 

[classical_hero]

African Americans.

 

[El_Machinae]

And again, since skin cells are potential people (and therefore as human as an embryo), one wonders why there is no one trumpeting their rights.

Edit: Irish C., just so you know, I understand what you're trying to say.

 

[GinandTonic]

Classical Hero, the difference is that with the creation of a new person there is demonstrably the lack of a person followed by the presence of a person. Therefore there IS a point were a new person comes into being and it is not unreasonable to debate at what point that is.

Not the same thing as slavery/ eugenics at all.