Questions regarding abortion discussion

[Simon_Jester]

So are you saying human value is subjective? That ones value flows wholly from the whim of another? Bodily autonomy aside for a moment, surely you are not saying a person's humanity exists only via the consent of another human? Whether you can kill a human or not is another question, we have lots of justifications for doing so (where we don't deny their humanity in the process). Where does humanity come from in your opinion? To be clear I am thinking post normal abortion timetables here, which most people agree on to some extent.

While I myself don't agree with Purple's arguments, I have to point out that if you take arguments designed to be used on people who've been born, and apply them to fetuses... You're going to get counterintuitive results no matter what.

Because you'll always end up dealing, at some point or on some level, with the "potentially a person but not yet" issue. Even if you decide that personhood begins at conception you have to ask the question of whether some degree of potential personhood applies to sperm or eggs.

It's like arguing about whether or not an acorn is an oak tree- it is potentially an oak tree if someone decides that it is, but clearly it isn't one now.

So there will always be some point in the process of human development where you're saying "wait, you mean to tell me that the personhood of this entity depends on someone else's decision?" It is a fact of human existence that we do not spring into being by an act of our own will- we do not create ourselves. Therefore, the process of our creation involves someone else making a decision, and can be said to depend on that decision.

[Patroklos]

My issue here was that Purple boiled it down to an individual, via the power of love or some such, determining when another individual has humanity (and presumably can take it away at will). I don't think I have to bring up how that has gone off the rails in history. Even when we let a larger society determine that threshold we have arguably seen the greatest abuses of that concept. I don't think you can have a variable status for a stage of development based on subjectivity. If we determine at stage of development at which a fetus becomes a human/person then it must always be so.

So that gets us back to the meat of the OP sort of. If we as a society have established a period of time where we do not allow abortions (some niche exceptions), generally agreed upon to be at least the third trimester for probably 90% of people including most pro-choice, there has to be a pretty damn good reason to do that to overcome all the bodily autonomy arguments and that determination is definitely independent of the mother. Its mandated by law externally. What does that tell us about societies value regarding the child at that point and how it should treat an assault on it? We already know one sort of assault on it, abortion, is illegal and punishable.

[Purple]

My issue here was that Purple boiled it down to an individual, via the power of love or some such, determining when another individual has humanity (and presumably can take it away at will).

Yes, that is exactly how it is. That's why we have abortions, contraceptives, abstinence etc. You get to chose if you want to go and make a human or not. Anything less than that and you might as well say that masturbation is genocide.

[Channel72]

The reason these debates are hopeless is because you can't even get anyone to agree on how to reason about this. We're all dealing in abstractions like "humanity", "life", "legality", etc., when the reality is that trying to classify and organize natural processes like the human life-cycle into our system of laws, ethics and religious ideas is just going to result in lots of contradictions, inconsistencies and baseless assertions.

Someone will complain about the inconsistency of treating a miscarriage via assault on a pregnant woman as murder, while treating abortion as something categorically different than murder... Okay, so is legal consistency our main goal here? Or do we just want to create a system that mostly results in outcomes that satisfy the most people? It's hard to create a system that necessarily does both.

There's clearly a "common-sense" notion that lots of people (and lots of societies, including the Hebrews who wrote the Old Testament) have, which is the idea that a child or adult human is worth more than a human fetus, or at least has more rights or something. This kind of thinking usually results in outcomes that make the most sense to the most people. When we start granting a lot of rights, normally reserved for children or adults, to embryos or fetuses, we usually start getting outcomes that are either absurd, inconvenient, useless, or even harmful. Of course, "fetus", "child", and "adult human" are not discrete states, but rather portions of a contiuum of biological development, and that sort of thing is notoriously resistant to easy legal classification. So we have to make some arbitrary judgment call - third trimester sounds about right. It still results in the absurd situation where having an abortion on Tuesday might be okay, but on Wednesday it's murder, but whatever. A better way would be to have advances in technology that can better monitor CNS activity in the developing fetus, and write the laws around some kind of litmus test involving brain activity and other relevant processes, but until we get there we'll just have to go with these rough approximations and arbtirary delineations.

[Purple]

Honestly I think the best benchmark would be to ask the question "if the child was born right now as a premature birth could it become a self sustaining creature (with the usual medical help given to such children)?" I have absolutely no idea what the time period is for such a thing but it just sounds to me as far more reasonable than monitoring brain activity or what ever else.

As for the consistency vs quality idea I personally think that we should primarily seek to create a system that mostly results in outcomes that satisfy the most people. Consistency should only ever be considered if it does not stand in the way of that.

[Caiaphas]

I absolutely agree with you on the preemie birth thing, Purple, but the thing is that even that isn't an absolute; at which point you need to ask, "at what percent chance of survival do we say, all right the kid's legally alive"? I mean, (pulling the numbers from thin air at the moment), say that being born three months premature has a national average survival rate to one year of 50%, and being born two months gives you a survival rate of 75%. Where then do we define legal life? If you define it at any given threshold, you're going to need to justify why you can't define it at a lower one. And even that survival rate is going to be largely dependent on the technology and equipment available at the local NICU, which muddles the issue even further.

[Purple]

I absolutely agree with you on the preemie birth thing, Purple, but the thing is that even that isn't an absolute; at which point you need to ask, "at what percent chance of survival do we say, all right the kid's legally alive"? I mean, (pulling the numbers from thin air at the moment), say that being born three months premature has a national average survival rate to one year of 50%, and being born two months gives you a survival rate of 75%. Where then do we define legal life? If you define it at any given threshold, you're going to need to justify why you can't define it at a lower one. And even that survival rate is going to be largely dependent on the technology and equipment available at the local NICU, which muddles the issue even further.

I really am not qualified to answer any of those questions on account of not being a medical professional. One thing I can say though is that since there is no intent to induce birth or anything like that there is no need to have local conditions effect the standard. Instead the standard should be set based on the notion of having the absolutely best possible conditions the nation can provide.