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A conversation conducted in public, and with earshot of members of the public, is not a private conversation by definition.
Though this is completely irrelevant to the fact the religions hold and try to enforce pernicious beliefs and dogma about what a woman should be allowed to do with her own body.
The bottom line as always is anyone can believe whatever they like, as long as they don't try and dictate to others that they must also follow their religious doctrine.
Arguments against abortions can only be assessed on their own merits, appeals to supernatural superstition, and subjective beliefs about unevidenced supernatural claims for things like souls are irrelevant to the debate.
A conversation conducted in public and within earshot of the public is not necessarily a public conversation because it is not necessarily `open' (in the social sense) to any member of the public. A public-membership conversation invites any public member to converse, regardless of situation; a private-membership conversation invites only a member of a determined subset of the public to join; a public-situation conversation occurs in a public place; a private-situation conversation occurs in a private place. Situation and invitation are disparate and usually independent qualities of a conversation. A conversation can be neither strictly public nor strictly private because it can be a public-situation private-membership conversation or a private-situation public-membership conversation. `Open lectures' or lectures with Q & A sessions at public universities are an example of the latter kind, and the conversation that user @Searching for truth gave is an example of the former kind: it is neither strictly public nor strictly private. Because it was conducted in a public place, its members had to adhere to laws governing conduct in public places; however, these laws, at least in the US, do not require the conversation members to convert their conversation into a public-membership conversation. Is it different in the UK?
Published in my local newspaper. I had to cut the 4 page document down to 200 words.
16 - Sadists Explain Respect for Life
Per the NIH, about 1/3 to ½ of fetal and maternal deaths are preventable through prenatal care. What is the current ‘administration’ and the Catholic Church working against – access to health care. The percentage of abortions performed because of medical reasons is about 20%. Doctor’s are not God. They cannot save everyone. Sometimes they have to choose which one they can save. The South American OB/GYN’s recently petitioned the Church to relax its antiabortion stance as they were sick of seeing the resultant carnage.
Per the NIH website, the number of unborn babies killed by violence to the mother is approximately equal to the number lost to abortion.
The estimates of pregnant women experiencing violence range from 16-25%! In all of the ‘Pro-Life’ stories about the babies ‘rescued’, I never heard of anyone ASKING THE MOTHER IF SHE WAS SAFE. The pro-lifers are only pro-birthers. Once the baby is born, it can starve to death. The number of abortions in this country is 1 per 70 Catholics. Out of 70 Catholics no one is willing to help one woman? The lady on the Women’s Rally bus agreed. She had a friend considering an abortion because she was overwhelmed. She went to all the churches in town and could find only two people who were willing to help her.
Abortions have dropped to a worldwide low because of access to birth control and access to health care.
Trump policy is a woman’s body must be available to a man at all times with no right to say no.
The ‘pro life’ ‘theology’ is only men have the right to murder unborn babies. If you complain, we’ll limit access to pre-natal care and increase the carnage. That’ll learn you to get uppity.
``Do they realize that abortion happens all time, and naturally? Not all eggs are fertilized and not all "pregnancies" (for all lifeforms) come to term.''
1. Obviously, it's definition, not `realization.'
2. `Organisms,' not `lifeforms.'
3. Do you mean to write `reproduction' when you put quotation marks around `pregnancies'?
``They say that abortion is always the most abhorrent sin . . . .''
This characterization of `pro-lifers' is hyperbolic, dishonest. Some of them--likely a small proportion--would agree that abortion is the worst sin; it's unlikely that even that many would ever say it aloud, or that the belief is stable. Similar issues with the second ``they say . . .'' claim.
``When only one spermatozoide fertilized an ovum, can we say that this same god is "aborting" millions of possible children?''
Yes, you could say that. I imagine that you rather care about whether you would be right when you say it; no, you can't say it rightly. The word `abortion' retains its meaning: an abortion is an abandonment of a process. In the popular abortion debates and debacles today, the process is pregnancy, which has a medical definition and a popular definition. The popular definition entails only the period between conception - fertilization - and birth; the medical definition entails only the period between birth and the earliest point at which the potential progeny is rightly classified as an embryo. The process of pregnancy is strictly associated with the time period of pregnancy. Therefore, abortion is not possible, under the popular definition, until after fertilization, or, under the medical definition, until after the zygote can be rightly called an embryo. Destroying sperm theretofore is not an abortion of a pregnancy.
@calhais
Yes i should have use better definitions. I said "absolute" pro-lifers. Sorry if i was being dishonest.
Let's take the logic to it's most absurd conclusion. Since 100% of all human life will die a natural death, murder should be legal.
That just skips over the whole debate part; it's sure to leave a lot of people unsatisfied. The structure of the argument does have some fun properties, though. The form <<`A' will have occurred completely but accidentally and in finite time, therefore we ought to be allowed to cause `A'>> almost succumbs to Hume's Fork. The general form fails trivially under a sufficiently lenient epistemology. However, not everyone will die `naturally,' and the analogy fails to account for the that though insemination, fertilization, and pregnancy are processes with determined purposes, there is controversy about the purpose of life. An abortion of life in the wise of an abortion of a pregnancy presupposes that there is a single overarching purpose in life, and that purpose is to remain alive.
It seems the original post was edited somehow. My argument was to the original post and not to whatever arguments you've already posted. However, the "natural death" does still hold if all that is is natural. Meaning a person killing another person, should be no different than a mosquito killing a person, or a virus, or a bacteria. I maintain that if another person kills someone else, under the materialistic worldview, it would be considered a natural death.
Got it. You're still wrong about naturalness: it refers to volition in this case, since it has to distinguish murder from other causes of death. I tailored the definition to your argument; either improve it, or leave it be.
What do you mean I'm wrong about naturalness? I'm not a materialist though I know many on here are. I'm actually a pro-life Christian. We both might have more in common
Let me explain more clearly what I meant by my last two comments.
This argument is valid if we're more precise: it is particularly all acts of dying that must be natural in order for all deaths to be natural deaths. My point was rather ontological: I implicitly argued that not all acts of dying are natural--i.e., that the `materialist' claim that all acts of dying are natural is unproductive. My last comment was meant to define murders as unnatural on account of their requiring volition. This is an application of the natural vs. manmade paradigm. I add that a proper materialist view accounts for volition and therefore rejects the claim that all acts are natural because motivation models have strong scientific backing in the fields of criminology and forensics.
I am a Christian in the sense that I am trying to be good and my values derive from the Gospel. I doubt I've ever met a very good person, Christian or not, and I doubt I ever shall. I believe that destructive acts, including abortion, are bad, and that when it is a developing human being destroyed, then the gains had better outweigh the cost. I am not a utilitarian, and as a consequence, I think that it is important for the would-be mother to consider the morality of her choice deeply and at pain of belabored thought. I also think that the mother ought to make the decision with the father, and that shutting out one of the parents on the basis of sex damages the culture. As a liberal, I rather want to protect the helpless and am reluctant to let adults destroy developing humans. I am not a humanist and do not believe that suffering or harm are inherently immoral; likewise, I do not believe that the absence of suffering or harm entails amorality or morality.
There you have it. How much do we have in common?
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We have a lot in common. Though I sense you agree with me that abortion is bad yet stop to say that that is a decision she should never make. I get that women will still try to make the choice of abortion but we should be clear that certain things should never be on the table. This is one of those things.
Uh, I am a pretty logic focused person, and I do not see the logic in "we will all die" leads to murder should be legal. I agree that is an absurd conclusion.
I also feel like that is quite the reach to try and tie this into the eternal abortion debate.
Dying is an inevitable thing, being murdered is a legality thing, it is much more efficient to minimize the murder of each other to help stave off the dying thing.
Oh, and a blastocyst or zygote does not = a person, not even close, just the potential to be one. You cannot make a definition of a human that includes a zygote without it ending up including a whole bunch of other stuff you would definitely not consider to be a human.
The argument posted by the OP (I believe it was edited recently) was that a certain percentage of pregnancies end naturally. I believe the number stated was only 20% make it to full term. Following this logic, it should be okay to do abortions since a majority of pregnancies end naturally anyway...
My point was to point out that all human life is going to end but it doesn't mean that directly killing another person should be okay because of it.
"Oh, and a blastocyst or zygote does not = a person, not even close, just the potential to be one. You cannot make a definition of a human that includes a zygote without it ending up including a whole bunch of other stuff you would definitely not consider to be a human."
-This isn't actually what biology has told us about the zygote or the blastocyst. Let's start with the assumption that we don't know it's a human person. What we do know about the blastocyst/zygote, is that it is alive and growing. Another thing, is that it has human parents and has human DNA. Another thing, is that it is not a part of the mother / it has it's own genetic makeup distinct from its mother. Now, I dunno how you define personhood but a living, growing thing with human parents sounds a lot like a human being.
When someone dies they do not die all at once. Would you say that someone that had parents and dna unique to his mother, the heart stopped beating, the brain cells have all died, but 5 percent of the body that is still living is a human? How about the fact that the dna is 99.9% the same as the mothers? A margin of difference that can be found within any persons bodies various cells?
You also used the word human to define human, sorry cannot do that. (Close synonyms do not work either!)
I doubt that the analogy between life and death holds in this sense: most would agree that death changes the state of living rather than the state of humanity. I appeal to popular opinion because I have not identified a more objective way to determine the degree to which someone is human. A modern outlook would acknowledge that a small (probably negligible, possible ridiculously small) amount of `bleed-through' between concepts happens, here meaning that dying decreases the degree to which you are a human by a very small amount. Exactly how much of this small change occurs with respect to what proportion of which cells of your body have finished dying out doesn't seem important in light of the idea that dying doesn't change your humanity much at all. On the other hand, the degree to which you are human changes the degree to which you are alive, under a morally charged definition for life.
That marginal difference in genetic makeup accounts for the difference in identity between adults. Don't mess with it.
An important factor that is often overlooked in abortion debates is that Christian doctrine, to a great degree unlike Jewish doctrine, considers the quality of our intentions as well as of our actions. A would-be couple planning an abortion, or seeking a definition for the phrase `living human' so that they can undershoot it, are morally very similar. I think that there is a strong Christian sentiment that it is wrong to consider killing anything past conception, or even to prevent conception during sex. This sentiment is consistent with the common stance that abstinence is the proper method of birth control, and conception, the proper purpose of sex.
That is fine, if you want to say living and humanity are different things, sure; I agree they are. Basically you just eliminated out "living" as a requirement for being a human. Now go back and define a human, without using the word living or it's synonyms and also without using the word "human" and it's synonyms. And then have that definition include a zygote or a blastocyst, without having that definition start including a lot of things I am sure most people would like to not consider a "human."
Point I am trying to make here is, people define humans how they want to, opinion. No one can make a hard and fast rule that we can all adopt, x is definitely a human, y is definitely not a human, this especially becomes the case when we talk zygotes and blastocyst. Where a healthy baby breathing on its own outside of the host body is a pretty easy case to make for human, where a tiny zygote smaller then a pinhead is one hell of a stretch to try to make for the definition of a human.
I bring up the marginal difference because there are marginal differences within our own bodies, which means strictly using dna as a definition of humans runs into problems. We humans are already terrible about killing/enslaving each other over tiny tiny marginal differences as well.
We all know how well "abstinence" goes. Welcome to "14 and pregnant." To me the various religions is the whole debate, and most certainly not overlooked. Why do so many religious people strongly STRONGLY object to abortion? Because they believe a fertilized egg is a human, god made it happen and gave it a soul. Or 2 or 3 or 4 souls etc because god is omnipotent and knew a few days later it would split into quadruplets. And there is no such thing as free will because you cannot have free will + omnipotence.
If the purpose of sex is conception, what is rape for these people? Fine as long as its purpose was conception? Who would want to live under those rules?
And there is no such thing as free will because you cannot have free will + omnipotence.
Under the set of definitions of `free will' for which that claim is correct, it doesn't really matter whether we have `free will.'
At most, a few people. That's why you had to invent the rule rather than report it.
This is the key takeaway, though `opinion' isn't the right word.
Not totally sure, but wouldn't that be specifically mitochondrial DNA with that high percentage of a match? Not the nuclear DNA?
Gone off to search...
rmfr
Well, chimps dna is 99% the same as ours. Other Homo Sapiens share at least 99.8 and obviously we are very VERY similar to our biological parents. So similar in fact that in many ways we are our parents in terms of instructions (dna) on how to be who we are.
We are more exact copies of our parents then a model of a particular model of a car is an exact copy of each other off the assembly line. And a car is far far! more simple than a human! Is amazing how much difference we have person to person when the instruction set/blueprint to be human are essentially the same. Ofcourse environment plays an enormous role, hence the whole: what makes us a unique human in large part is our environment. Just like how the car's environment after it comes off the assembly line makes it become unique.
So nuclear dna 99.9, mitochondrial dna 99.995? Just a guess though :)
And I did find it. 99% of a child's nDNA will match both parents. The mDNA is virtually 100% match to the mother.
And, no, I did not cite sources because there was a ton of them...
rmfr
mDNA would have a higher match, actually. Nuclear DNA would lie at around a 99.9% match. You forget how much we share with sea sponges.
How then would you define a human? I'm actually at a loss since this should be very simple. Since we're talking in biological terms, I can say a dog is an animal with dog DNA. It really shouldn't be so hard. One can say that a dog is an animal with scientific name _________, then procede to define that scientific name to be an animal with so and so DNA. So please, let\s hear the definition of a human person or a human being.
@JoC
That is the real tricky part here. It is actually quite difficult to define "human" We are left with guesses and vague lines, utilizing a few major events in the cycle, we want to draw lines, like fertilization of the egg, or the point of decent viability outside the womb, or even birth, but they are all opinions.
However, if we pick moment of viability outside of the womb as the line, we can neatly solve the problem of one person's opinion being enforced on a woman's body, potentially against their will, that has a different opinion.
"Let's take the logic to it's most absurd conclusion. Since 100% of all human life will die a natural death, murder should be legal."
According to the bible it is for your deity, and anyone he gives a pass to. So much for moral absolutes.
First, sorry for the mashup job. Been gone for a while working. Still ain't finished, but I needed a break. Now I am playing with the ketchup.
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It is even funnier how us atheists (and all sciences) are living rent-free in the minds of Absolutists...
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Calhais, you forget one thing. Atheist have no beliefs. Actually, they have no beliefs in any god(s). Just facts and our reasoning and rationality and critical thinking.
Additionally as Sheldon said, but I am going to use my words which is basically the same thing. I actually have mine own Ten Commandments. My Fourth one states:
Clarification: I may respect your right to hold whatsoever beliefs you may wish to have. However, it does NOT mean I have to respect your beliefs. And vice versa is true. You do not have to repsect my beliefs (as if I had any).
As far as I have read in this thread, no one is forcing their beliefs onto you. You are the one who VOLUNTARILY came to these boards to read our opinions and arguments. If there is any forcing being done, then it is you yourself who is forcing our opinions and arguments onto yourself.
Furthermore, it is always the Absolutists who come at people in the public trying to force their beliefs onto others by trying to convince they need an imaginative Sky Faerie and a Magic Zombie Virgin to save their soul. I have never seen any Atheist approach other persons and trying to convince them they need to adopt reason, rationality, and critical thinking.
I also notice that you, Calhais, does not know to use the Shift key to get the double quote... Talk about being a monkey.
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I have to admit I am a militant anti-religionist, yet also an apistevist. However, my definition of my militantism is a bit different.
Basically, my militantism is restricted to words, ideas, and arguments ONLY.
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Finally got the end of the thread. Nice comments from both sides.
My statement @ OP: I am Pro-Choice. It is the woman's right to decide how her body is going to be used. She has the right to decide whether to allow a parasitic organism to use her body to eventually become a human. Yes, that is right. Until the "fetus" is born, it is literally a "parasite" using the woman's body to grow itself.
Please do not get me wrong. I am all for a child who is desired and wanted to be born, to be born. However, if you were to look at the True Truth, that "child" is a "parasite" until it is matured enough to exist on its own (of course with some help until it is grown enough).
And here is the viewpoint I take offense at from the Absolutists (from my new book Riding Some Wild Tangents 2: I'm Out the Closet Now!):
rmfr
So you read what I wrote to Sheldon! I did later reply to Cognostic, who had written,
That comes off as a command, in which wise it is an attempt to enforce the belief that theists should not talk about their religious beliefs. I was not the intended recipient of the command.
I believe that decent people will, in their virtue, use good faith in discourse. I could pretend to infer from your block-lettered word, `voluntarily,' that you do not know how to add bold text to a comment, but I didn't. Play nice. I wonder why you emphasized the word at all; if you have a point to make about voluntary participation, then give it here; be forward!
False. Demonstrably false. Cognostic's comment is a counterexample. Avoid making absolute claims like that.
@ calhais
Another misinterpretation unworthy of comment...
rmfr
1 Either be forward and clear, and write explicitly, or be misinterpreted: this is how language works. 2 You commented, which, by definition, implies that at the time you wrote the comment, you believed my comment was worthy of a response. Do not lie.
@ calhais
I was. I did.
Read it again. You sure English is your primary language? I never used "comment" to describe what you wrote.
Only Absolutists do that.
rmfr
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