Abortion
Discussion started by Dennis Hackethal
I’m pro abortion but I have some pro life in me.
Banning the abortion of a zygote seems ridiculous. So does aborting a seven-month-old fetus.
Why not go with: you can abort until the nervous system develops.
Clearly, a fetus without a nervous system can’t be sentient and thus can’t be a person, right? And as long as it’s not a person, it doesn’t have any rights.
It’s not right to force a parent to take care of a child they didn’t want. The result is often tragic. Abortion relieves parents of that responsibility and prevents this outcome. Parents don’t owe their children anything, and children don’t owe their parents anything.
(Amaro)
The result is often tragic. Abortion relieves parents of that responsibility and prevents this outcome.
Adoption
Parents don’t owe their children anything […].
Yes they do. They are responsible for bringing a helpless being into the world who depends on them.
depends whether the mother took measures to not get pregnant, if she did and still got pregnant - less responsibility
She was neither forced nor tricked. She took an action which she knew (or should have known) comes with certain risks. The risks materialized. That doesn’t make her any less responsible.
On the contrary, per my suggestion, she had six weeks to monitor whether she was pregnant. That’s long enough to miss her period, which is a huge warning sign she’d have to be extremely dishonest about with herself to just ignore. During those six weeks, she could have unilaterally decided to get an abortion safely and with impunity. She instead chose to ignore her pregnancy, evade it, not do anything about it, whatever.
A lot of the problems around abortion will go away with better technology. (Dirk)
There should be a pill for men, too. That would really shift the power dynamic, too. (Martin)
Many suggestions around abortion can be evaluated by asking at whose expense? Whenever the answer is at the baby’s, something is wrong, since the baby did not make any decisions and thus cannot be held responsible.
Ayn Rand writes:
An embryo has no rights. Rights do not pertain to a potential, only to an actual being. A child cannot acquire any rights until it is born. The living take precedence over the not yet living (or the unborn).
It’s true that potential beings cannot have rights. But once a fetus is a person, it’s not a potential being anymore. It’s then an actual being.
It’s not the birth that turns a fetus into a person – it’s the running of the universal-explainer software I mentioned in #119. And that might occur before birth.
Abortion is a moral right—which should be left to the sole discretion of the woman involved; morally, nothing other than her wish in the matter is to be considered. Who can conceivably have the right to dictate to her what disposition she is to make of the functions of her own body?
Preventing unwanted pregnancy is the goal. Ending an unwanted pregnancy should happen with shame and as early as possible. It’s a mistake that gets worse with time.
practically, i think the best we can do now is viability outside the mother
if it's viable and there are people willing to adopt [then] the mother shouldn't have the right to kill it
if there's no one willing to take care of it i don't see how anyone can demand for it to not be aborted.
I don't think it's a right to have other people take care of you. The cutoff point is a moral one, but rights are both moral and political institutions. You're right that it'd be ideal for the moral and political institutions to align but it's hard to do that. That's why I think there's some truth to the argument: "Even if abortion were immoral it should be legal".
Saying the baby has a right to be taken care of in such and such a manner means nothing if there's no one there to do the taking care of. One of the requirements of being a good parent, I think, is wanting to be one. So by forcing the mother that was irresponsible to carry to term might actually ruin her life, and make the baby's one not worth living.
This seems like a response to another idea (presumably #230 and/or #232), rather than a top-level idea itself. I suggest you move this idea and break it up if necessary. Mark it as a criticism to whatever ideas you end up criticizing.
But first, familiarize yourself with the current state of the discussion. Ensure that you’re making new points. These sound like points others have made before you. Read the entire discussion before you continue. If these points are indeed duplicates, either think of new criticisms or address existing criticisms. Don’t repeat the same ideas if you can’t address preexisting issues with them.
Some say that there’s a soul from the moment of conception; that the soul has a right to life.
For non-viable pregnancies, where a doctor reasonably predicts that the baby will die during pregnancy or shortly after, abortions should be allowed throughout the entire pregnancy to avoid unnecessary suffering for parents and child.
This is the kind of thing that’s messed up and should be prevented: https://x.com/CatchUpFeed/status/1819079527366382071
There are financial incentives to do abortions as late as possible.
This video says 30 seconds in that babies cry inside the womb at 15 weeks. Crying seems to be a uniquely human activity. Maybe this is evidence that babies are already people and sentient in the womb.