Abortion
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With an account, you can revise, criticize, and comment on ideas, and submit new ideas.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)
Parents facing the consequences of their actions isn’t “force”.
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.
We already have laws for how to deal with neglect.
(Danny)
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.
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.
If you want the abortion to happen as early as possible, then shame is the last thing you want, as it will cause pregnant women to put off the decision for fear of being shamed.
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 people say the demarcation point should be the heartbeat.
The heartbeat has no particular epistemological or moral relevance.
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.