Did you know: until the early 80s, the religious position was that life began at birth, and specifically with the newborn's first (unaided) breath.

It wasn't until the Right realized that the sexual revolution wasn't just a phase and needed a new way to limit the sexual agency and freedom of people who weren't cis men that the current "life begins at conception" rhetoric settled in.

@Shamar @noelle
Well, life begins, but is it a life of a person?

We don't call it a murder, when you kill a chicken, or a worm. We only call it a murder when you kill another person.

So, is an embryo already a person? or is it just an animal?

@Shamar @noelle dunno, maybe being unable to pass a turing test?
What makes it more of a person than a fly?

@Shamar @noelle
Would that mean that:
- if another species was equally intelligent to humans, but its DNA was very different from that of a human, it wouldn't be a person?
- if a non-biological creature, eg. an electronic one, was as intelligent as humans, it wouldn't be a person?
- if you uploaded your mind to a computer, the copy of your mind wouldn't be a person?

@Shamar damn it, I shouldn't have asked a question with negation in it, now your answers are ambiguous.

By "Yes." did you mean "Yes, it wouldn't be a person" ?

@Shamar
IMO that's spiecist. We shouldn't be judging by spiecies.

@Shamar
I mean, yes, you cannot become or stop being a human.
But being human doesn't matter.
Or at least shouldn't matter.

@Shamar
IMO, it is wrong to define murder as killing a human.

It's almost as wrong, as defining murder as killing an europid.

btw. http://www.catb.org/jargon/html/anthropomorphization.html

@Shamar
Ok, but if you go with such definition of murder, then I'll argue that whether a killing is a murder or not should have no effect on it being morally ok or wrong.

@Shamar
I'm not disagreeing that oppression is the purpose/motivation. Haven't thought about that yet.

As for killing:
IMO it's ok to kill non-intelligent creatures. It is not ok to kill intelligent creatures.
I don't know where to draw a line, i.e. how intelligent a creature needs to be for it to be not ok to kill it. But an average healthy adult human is definitely above the threshold, while a bacterium is definitely below the threshold.

@Shamar
I don't know.

@Shamar @Wolf480pl As someone who *has* held their newborn children in their arms, I think that infanticide *is* ethically justifiable.

It's much like euthanasia. There's a lot of ethical complexity *around* infanticide - to what extent is the parents' choice free, to what extent does it problematically devalue human life, and so on.

But the raw act of killing a newborn is, in my opinion, less bad than killing an adult chimpanzee; it has greater capacity for suffering.

@Shamar @Wolf480pl Why should we kill anything at all?

Ideally, we wouldn't!

But we're compelled to kill billions of bacteria every day; we willingly kill any number of plants and animals, and we'll sometimes kill just because it's convenient.

Which is ok, as long as the benefit we're getting from the destruction is worth it.

For abortion the benefits can be huge - children require a huge amount of emotional and financial resources.

@Shamar @Wolf480pl And it's great that you love your daughters and have been able to provide for them!

But not everyone is you!

Not everyone has the same experiences, or will have the same response to the same experiences as you.

There are people who really hate their kids; who didn't want them, regret having them, and resent the sacrifices they've been compelled to make. In that situation both the parents *and* the children would have been better off with abortion.

@Shamar @Wolf480pl
No!

Not just cheaper!

The mother is pregnant for 9 months! During which she's at risk of a bunch of serious health complications. She might get terrible morning sickness. She's prevented from doing a whole lot of things, and, towards the end, she's literally exhausted by it.

Abortion is not JUST financially cheaper!

@Shamar @Wolf480pl
Now, if we happened to be able to remove the fetus from the mother and gestate it outside, *then* abortion would be just cheaper.

And *even* *then* being cheaper is ethically important!

External gestation would take significant resources; those resources would be unavailable for other purposes. If you can treat 100 cancer patients with the resources it would take to externally gestate one baby, is it still ethical?