Supreme Court overturns Roe v. Wade; states can ban abortion
- Thread starter Piscian
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I really doubt that the only thing keeping couples from making babies is having pets in their homes to any significant degree.
Maybe if raising children wasn't a first class trip to financial ruination more people would be on board? I have no interest in kids to begin with but my cat costs like €50 a month to feed.
I certainly recall that when I was a kid, your pet had a serious illness, chances are you'd just put it down.
Nowadays they get pacemakers, and anticonvulsant meds for epilepsy, and all sorts of amazing and eye-wateringly expensive stuff which in the old days would have got an anaesthetic overdose instead.
Well, we already have that, it's just that a certain group of people (white conservatives) want those masses to be white.
Yeah well, I want the human race to go on. So we can build cool shit in Space.
To an extent, a fetus maintains homeostasis and has metabolism within its own cells. Not to the same scale as an adult, but more than a bacteria does. The only thing on the list it doesn't do is reproduce, but you're not about to tell me that a human isn't an organism until they hit puberty.
You're reaching for a distinction that isn't there.
We don't afford the same rights to all people, but we do some rights, most notably life. Funny enough, you're not allowed to murder a dead person either.
Being loved by someone else isn't the tragedy. Not being loved by the people who created you is the tragedy. That is a harm done.
I'm very aware that they dont see the difference
Does that mean I shouldn't state my reasoning? Even if they will not accept anything I say?
I'm not the one pretending the a fetus is like a adult. Perhaps if you add some distinction, it would benefit your argument
Like Phoenix pointed out, you aren't interested in semantics. You just want agreement
My argument is that the distinction you're making isn't based in reality. Why would I "add some distinction"? A fetus is a living human organism, it is just as much alive as you or I, the lack of that distinction is my argument.
Unlike most people here, I think Phoenix is on the right side of more arguments than not... but Phoenix is really not good at argumentation, I would not be taking pointers from him.
Can you explain why burial or cremation of a dead body are OK, without reference to the fact a dead body has zero awareness or experience of the world.
They see the difference, they don't care about the difference. If you like a certain genre of whatever, you like it because of the similarities. Both sides have prioritized a different moral value in the abortion moral dilemma and it's very hard to convince someone to say the other one is more important than their chosen one. You probably can't be convinced, right? Why would someone else be able to be convinced then? Hence, why I never argued that pro-choice or pro-life was the right side and only said the Roe decision was poor from a legal standpoint.
Thanks...?
Let me clarify this for you, since you seem to have completely failed to read or understand the point.
I don't think that life is meaningless at all. Your definition of life, the attempt to reduce life purely to interactions of proteins and molecules, makes it meaningless. On the level you want to pretend that life exists it is just the meaningless gyration of matter and energy, and if you insist on trying to find meaning on that level you are robbing life of any significance. You have erased the difference between humans and bacteria, and noone gives a shit about the "life" of a bacterium. We certainly don't give a shit about their opinions on what does or doesn't constitute life.
The irony, again, is that I am left defending the actual Christian tradition, because whether you believe in the literal truth of a soul or not it is a far more compelling and useful explanation for the condition of being a human being. There is something mysterious and immanent about the condition of being a thinking part of a dead universe. No other part of the universe, as far as we know, can be conscious in the way some living things are. That distinction is an authentic basis for the value of life. The ability to turn food into shit is not, that's just chemistry.
As far as we know, dead things can't feel pain at all. If the avoidance of pain was the only thing that made killing morally objectionable, there'd be no reason not to kill anyone. In fact, you could easily argue that it is morally good to kill everyone in order to eliminate suffering from the universe altogether.
My perspective in this regard is actually quite Nietzchean. Pain is an inevitable part of life, and I deeply, deeply love life. I love the condition of being alive. I love the freedom that comes with that condition. I reject everything that would destroy that freedom. I don't pursue pleasure because pleasure is intrinsically good, but because pursuing pleasure, even in the knowledge that it will never be enough and will often lead to pain, is a part of the human condition and I deeply, deeply love being human.
Now let's turn this one back.
Let's assume that God exists in the sense you believe He does. Let's assume we all have this giant disapproving dad who sits on a cloud somewhere judging us. Why do you care what God thinks? Why does it matter to you? Why do you seek to conform your life to what you believe that entity wants? If God has the ability to dictate what is moral or immoral, then you have the same ability too.
If the answer is that you believe you will be punished, then here's an easy question for you. Why is punishment bad? Why is it better to be rewarded than punished?
Yeah, I think maybe the hedonism is coming from inside the house.
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...and it is. Good policy but poor law. A lot of pro-choice arguments fall into that sort of thing, being good policy defended poorly. Especially ones that argue that abortion rights are just an application of some broader principle, because often that broader principle will be argued to just not apply in most other cases where it might be controversial.
A dead body is dead.
Oh no, it was definitely not a complement. Though, to be fair, it could just be you doing what makes you happy, but you tend towards making claims beyond what you can support or insisting on carrying out arguments you've otherwise won. From my perspective, you gotta learn to take the W and walk away sometimes.
You aren't. You're defending Aristotle, whose views influenced many Christian scholars in history, but the Catholic Church has always maintained that abortion is a sin.
There was argument about "formed" vs "unformed" fetuses for centuries, but that does not agree with what you're arguing in any sense. The Catholic view is that the body and soul are one in the same, they cannot be separated. The argument for aborting unformed fetuses was that if a soul requires a body, then if there is no body, there is not soul. It has nothing to do with consciousness or awareness. And if you match that argument to modern science that can observe the fetus in every stage of development, the only reasonable conclusion is that there is always a soul from the moment of conception.
I do not believe that.
Who cares if it's a sin? Human existence is a sin.
The medieval Catholic doctrinal and legal position was that a fetus was not a person until animated by a human soul at some point after conception. The Catholic position, still generally held today is that souls are immortal and that human bodies are separated from their souls at the point of death. Some modern Catholics have adopted the evangelical belief in the physical resurrection of the body, but even they typically believe that physical resurrection is the reunion of soul and body that are separated in death. In short, you are misrepresenting one position as another. It is not that body and soul are the same thing or cannot exist without the other, but that the unity of body and soul defines what it means to be a living person.
The key difference is that the medieval Catholic concept of the soul is Aristotelian. It is specifically the part of the human that is capable of rationality, the part that shares the quality of self-awareness with God. It is not some vague, nebulous concept that requires us to believe there is anything sacred or magical about the behavior of polymers made of carbon atoms. In that sense, it is infinitely closer to saying something meaningful about the state of being a human being in this world.
Modern science observes that most fetuses spontaneously abort shortly after conception.
Do they have souls? Do their souls matter? If a soul is such a worthless thing that most of them die in the first few days, why should they matter to us anyway? What's one more abortion in the perpetual, natural holocaust perpetrated by the basic design of the human body?
Again, when you try to expand the boundaries of life, or personhood, or the soul to include random examples of organic chemistry you are going to end up in an absurd situation where the thing you are claiming is important becomes obviously meaningless. I get that liminality can be frightening, I get that it's easier to have clear, determinate answers than to deal with the complex nature of reality but tough shit. You live in a complex reality.
More specifically eternal, unconfined by time, and thus never truly separated from your living body. Thus, if you live a heinous life, devoid of love and separate from the grace of God, you trap yourself in an eternal hell of your own creation.
Why does that attribute matter? Its a distinct, human organism, which you previously indicated was enough to warrant protection.
Could it be because the dead body has no experience of the world, no thought?