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abortion, Did You Know Show more

abortion, Did You Know Show more

abortion, Did You Know Show more

abortion, Did You Know Show more

@Shamar @noelle @Wolf480pl
there are some important distinctions to make here

1: life does not begin at birth, but neither does it begin at conception. life began a very long time ago and has stuck around since, spreading and changing but never yet stopping. whether you personally believe that it began as a single cell that became everything else or began as a fully formed pair of humans, that still holds true.

2. the thing that is significant about the birth of a child, then, is the coming into existence of a new person. that is, a sentient entity. a human is human for the entirety of its existence, but at any point it may or may not be a sentient, a person. the difficult bit here, of course, is defining how "intelligent and self aware" a thing needs to be before it can be considered sentient and a person. thankfully we have some societally decided-on precedents here. pigs, for example, are not considered to be people. since a just-born baby is less intelligent and self-aware than an adult pig, then, we can claim with certainty that it is also not yet a person. similarly, it is possible for a human to later in life experience some sort of brain death and again drop below these well-known and accepted boundaries, and thus cease to be a person while still alive.

given these conditions, the killing of a newborn child would be, although the killing of a human, not the killing of a person. since the widely-accepted moral stance on killing non-humans (like pigs) is "go ahead, it's fine", we can also conclude it would not be morally reprehensible (assuming an internally consistent system of morality, but that's something else entirely).

that all being said, personally i would not kill a newborn child or advocate doing so, for the same reason i would not kill a pig or advocate doing so: the line between sentient and non-sentient, person and non-person, is still and probably always will be "a very wuzzy line" (see https://www.ted.com/talks/jane_goodall_on_what_separates_us_from_the_apes/transcript ).

like "innocent until proven guilty", which aims to prevent the conviction of innocents in exchange for the aquittal of some guilty, walking near that line means the killing of a whole lot of non-people but potentially some people as well, which is not even a little bit ok at all, and people should really really stop killing each other please ;_;. it seems reasonable, then, to draw the line somewhere much further back (where it is currently, in pre-birth development). similarly i do not kill or eat animals i know to have any significant intelligence/self-awareness (like pigs or octopodes) and would advocate a line being drawn further back beneath their level as well
@Shamar @Wolf480pl @noelle
i specifically referred to and accounted for intelligence and self awareness not being well-defined, as well as your slippery slope argument. the point of staying far below the socially acknowledge line is to avoid the possibility of "messing up and getting it wrong" and killing a person.

and you are the one who is, in this case, not acknowledging and granting those who are not like yourself the possibility of personhood. as i mentioned above, a pig is more intelligent and self-aware than a human infant. thus, if you would define the infant as a person, you must also define the pig as a person, unless you're playing favourites, saying those that resemble yourself are more "worthy" than others.
@Shamar @noelle @Wolf480pl
wasn't talking about politics at all or anything to do with money
@Shamar
i was not talking about politics or resource allocation. i was talking about people.

i also believe that applying some differential "value" to a person is dangerous, and it is immoral according to my personal set of ethical axioms. the point where we differ is in what a "person" is. you define everything human as being what i would call a person and deny the possibility of that personhood applying to non-humans which are more intelligent and self-aware than some humans (e.g. pigs, octopodes, chimpanzees, dolphins, dogs等). this is logically inconsistent, unless your view what is intrinsic to personhood differs from mine (that is, that it is another name for a sentient entity, a product of intelligence and self-awareness). if we disagree on that as well then we've no way to bridge the gap in belief systems.

maybe it's better to focus on the other bits you've brought up then. you claim that any woman, given the availability of time and resources to do so, would choose to birth a child. this is not true. it may be true of you personally (or maybe you aren't a woman?), and it is true of me personally as well, but it is not universally true of all women. some women enjoy working, either at a traditional job or on personal goals and projects, and feel that having a child, or even just the time and energy and pain required to birth one and recover afterwards, would hinder those pursuits more than they would like. some women (or rather, every woman, but some more than others) would be in physical, potentially mortal danger and would prefer to avoid having a child for that reason. some women want children, but at a later point in life when they "feel ready" or "can devote enough time to them". some women even do not want children because they're scared of becoming attached and of what that attachment might do to them.

your personal opinions are not universally applicable

beyond all that, child bearing has long been a way to hold women captive, a man taking a woman against her will and using children as a means to tie her there, through attachment to the children as well as societal requirement that she must keep them. it was one tool of many for that purpose, alongside things like religious ties and the practice of men taking ownership of all a woman's capital through marriage. to argue the reverse is to ignore this historical context

of course it would also be a good thing (no, not unthinkable at all) if there was more of a social net to fall back on for a woman who has a child but doesn't have the means to support it. that's an entirely separate and unrelated issue, though. i'm not a fan of capitalism either, but capitalism is irrelevant to the question of choice
Shamar @Shamar

@shmibs

... just to deathly health issues. And even in these cases women should not be left alone: they need the whole support from people around them.

However when people talk about abortion as an anticonception technique they are infact proposing as a resource allocation tool.

It's not an unusual tool actually. Every out there is fought for resources. It's neither for nor : it's just killing for their resources.

And it's not even... 4/

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@Shamar
from the shift to a patronising tone, would it be right to glean that you are a man?

also, you're talking to yourself again
@Shamar
that seems a disingenuous request, unless it was meant as rhetoric or you do not have the degree of self awareness needed to see the patronising attitude in yourself. i was referring to your use of constructions like these:

"Your sexual life is your. Men have no rights over it.

BUT ..."

"#massmurder"

"Trust me, ..."

"Crazy? Why?"

"Why... exactly? 😉"

particularly at the end there, you revert to a smug semi-socratic stance, implying yourself to be of higher status and a teacher speaking to a wilfully misinformed student.

as for talking to yourself, i already agreed to a shared dislike of "#capitalism" and "#freemarket". i already agreed that women who choose to birth children should be supported with the means to birth and care for those children. your continuing to harp on those points, and not responding to anything else, reveals that you either have not read or do not wish to reply to the things i've written.