At what point, from conception does a ''phetus'' become a human being?

As long as you are citing the Supreme Court, would you care to state their position on abortion?

 

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This is not true. Alimony implies being a slave. One is forced to use their body to work for something they may not believe in. If they fail to be a slave they can end in jail. They do not have the right to chose. The same is true of taxes, where you are a slave to the state a sizeable fraction of the time you work. You should have the right to chose but law can step and take away that right at force of gun.

A man does not have the right to chose abortion or not even though it is half his. There is another example. I suppose the dual standard is par for the course.

 

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What about if the drowning man attacks you in the course of trying to get out of the water? Are you obliged to drown to save him? No.

 

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Having to work is not comparable to being forced to donate the use of your body for nine months.

As for your complaint that men not being allowed to choose abortion is a dual standard - no, sorry, it's not for the simple reason that it's not his body. Having a child is not an equal process for men and women.

She has to carry for nine months and suffer the effects.

He has to ejaculate.

Why should a man get to decide that someone else does or doesn't give up their body for nine months?

 

Right.

Seems that the argument is somewhat allinged with Pro-Life. Let's give this another try. Here is my understanding:
1. If I see someone attacking a baby's heart(body), and I don't bother assisting the baby to my ability, that is definitely a crime.
2. If a baby was miscarried, and I did not donate my own life, that is not a crime.

 

Are you referring to the practice of stopping the heart with KCl during late term abortions?

If so are you honestly arguing that physically preventing a woman from having an abortion is okay??

 

Nothing you said here makes much sense. Any attack on a baby would be a crime and a baby is never miscarried. Only a fetus can be miscarried. Keep your terms correct when talking babies and fetuses, and also keep your personal feelings separate from the law.

Apparently nobodies going to change your mind about the difference between babies and fetuses, but more people in this country don't feel the way you do about it and that's why the laws don't reflect your opinion.

 

@Mind Over Matter --

Nice link. I like that his entire argument rests on the existence of souls, something which is manifestly undemonstrated. If he, or you, can demonstrate the existence of souls then his argument will have merit, as it stands he refutes nothing I've said.

Furthermore, the right to life is not inalienable, it(like all other rights) is conditional. We lose it the instant we attempt to deprive other of varying rights. If someone attacks me with a knife and I think that they are either attempting to kill me or that there is a danger of death then they have lost their right to life. In a related manner, there's no such thing as absolute morality either, as there are always conditions in which the currently accepted morality becomes immoral, such as forcing a woman to continue with a life threatening pregnancy.

@Killjoyklown --

The ruling of the SCOTUS is that the rights of the mother, including the right to do what she will with her body, override any rights the fetus could be considered to have.

 

Thanks, I was hoping to get that answer from Mind Over Matter, but I was getting tired of waiting.

 

I live in the Philippines. Article II of the 1987 Philippine Constitution says, in part, "Section 12. The State recognizes the sanctity of family life and shall protect and strengthen the family as a basic autonomous social institution. It shall equally protect the life of the mother and the life of the unborn from conception....."

As for the position of abortion in the US, the governing principle is the Roe v Wade decision in 1973, which invalidated then existing State laws limiting abortion, based on such infringing the woman's "right to privacy" (which is nowhere in the Constitution, and exists nowhere in human life unrelated to abortion).

 

@Mind Over Matter --

You need to read the Bill of Rights a bit more thoroughly. You should go and read the Fourth Amendment which the SCOTUS interprets as a right to privacy.

 

I clipped some interesting information from the following link.

http://www.answers.com/topic/abortion

Gale Encyclopedia of Public Health: Abortion

Abortion is a generic term for pregnancies that do not end in a livebirth or a stillbirth. It is the premature expulsion from the uterus of the products of conception, which include the placenta, bag of waters, and fetus, if present.

Types of Abortion

There are two types of abortions. Spontaneous abortion refers to a natural biological process by which some pregnancies end. Induced abortion refers to pregnancies terminated through human intervention.

Spontaneous Abortions. A large percentage of the products of the union of an egg and a sperm never become infants. If there is something seriously wrong with the fetus, the uterus often expels it. This may occur very early in the pregnancy, with the woman only experiencing a larger than usual blood flow around the time of her expected menstrual period, or it may occur later in the pregnancy. This latter event is commonly called a miscarriage, but technically it is a spontaneous abortion if it occurs before twenty weeks of pregnancy. Spontaneous abortions are often the body's way of preventing the birth of a defective child, although sometimes they are due to maternal health problems.

Induced Abortions. In contrast, induced abortions result from the planned interruption of a pregnancy. Throughout recorded history, humans have taken a variety of steps to control family size: before conception by delaying marriage or through abstinence or contraception; or after the birth by infanticide. Induced abortion falls temporally between these two extremes by preventing a conception from becoming a live birth. In the United States in the last few decades of the twentieth century, most abortions were performed surgically using a procedure called suction curettage. The year 2000 approval in the United States of a drug, mifepristine (RU486), which in combination with another drug causes an abortion in almost all cases, may increase the percentage of abortions induced by the administration of pharmaceutical agents.

Therapeutic Abortions. This term refers to abortions thought necessary because of fetal anomalies, rape, or to protect the health of the mother when a birth might be life threatening or physically or psychologically damaging.

Elective or Voluntary Abortions. Interruption of a pregnancy before viability at the woman's request for reasons other than fetal anomalies or maternal risk is often referred to as elective or voluntary abortion. Such abortions often result from social problems, such as teenage pregnancy or non-marital births; economic difficulties, such as insufficient income to support a child; or inappropriate timing.

Legal and Illegal Abortions. Induced abortions may be legal or illegal. According to the United States Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), the federal agency that collects data on abortions, a legal abortion is "a procedure, performed by a licensed physician or someone acting under the supervision of a licensed physician, that was intended to terminate a suspected or known intrauterine pregnancy and to produce a nonviable fetus at any gestational age." An illegal abortion may be self-induced, induced by someone who is not a physician or not acting under her or his supervision, or induced by a physician under conditions that violate state laws governing abortions.

A Historical Perspective

Almost all human societies place a high value on human life. Thus, the further along the continuum from heterosexual intercourse to a live child, the less likely is the method of fertility control to be allowed. In the modern period, most societies allow contraception, but there is more variability around abortion. The leading institutional opposition comes from the Roman Catholic Church, but other institutions also take active positions against abortion. Survey research suggests that many Americans are ambivalent about whether abortion should be legal and, if so, under what circumstances.

Induced abortion was almost universally illegal at the beginning of the twentieth century. This changed first in the early years of the Soviet Union, which made abortion legal, widely available, and encouraged as the primary method of fertility control. In the period after World War II, abortion was legalized first in the Scandinavian countries and later in most of Western and Eastern Europe. With the broaching of the Iron Curtain in the early 1990s, abortion was legalized in more of Eastern Europe, while the more restrictive policy in West Germany was extended to the former East Germany. At the beginning of the twenty-first century, abortion was legal in most of England and Asia, but illegal in most of Africa and South America.

In the United States, abortion was universally illegal from at least the late nineteenth century until the mid-1960s, when an abortion reform movement led to legalization of abortion in some states. (The regulation of abortion, like most medical issues, is a state function.) Then, in its 1973 Roe v. Wade decision, the United States Supreme Court found a constitutional right to abortion before viability, at that time about twenty-eight weeks. (By the beginning of the twenty-first century, advances in the techniques of caring for very premature infants had reduced the age of viability to around twenty-three weeks.) The Court stated, however, that after viability is reached, the state's important and legitimate interest in potential life becomes compelling and it may regulate and even prohibit abortions, with the exception of those necessary to preserve the life or health of the mother.


Read more: http://www.answers.com/topic/abortion#ixzz1X8qNLUNY

 

That's true in the Netherlands as well. You have an obligation to help, if it's reasonable.

 

Hi James

That's a very good question, and it's not an easy search. If anybody can find a link to clarify this issue please post.

If you are involved in an accident, you are legally obligated to render aid or face felony prosecution. Most people carry a cell phone with them, and to see someone in trouble and not make a 911 call should be criminal.

 

Dogs kill dogs. To the point that there is even the phrase "It's a dog-eat-dog world."

Why should humans, who are more intelligent than dogs and dolphins, condemn their fellow human beings to eternal damnation?

 

Humans who are more intelligent than dogs and dolphins should pray, love their fellow human beings.

 

Or else..

 

I'll check. I could be wrong

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Animals don't have more rights than humans by virtue of the fact that they are animals, and we are humans. Notable people, from philosophers to politicians would view your claim as absolutely preposterous. Judge Richard Posner of the United States Court of Appeals, for instance, asserted that "human beings prefer their own. If a dog threatens a human infant, even if it requires causing more pain to the dog to stop it, than the dog would have caused to the infant, then we favour the child. It would be monstrous to spare the dog.". What this indicates to us is that moral intuition tells us to safeguard our own. And we place humans above animals in a wide range of circumstances, and to deny such is to deny reality.

No, they do not. Humans don't kill humans, or at least it's not ingrained in the human psyche to kill another human being. Murderers are regarded as "exceptions" and "anomalies" - they are not representative of the general population. The vast majority of humans have not and will not kill another human being. Even cities with the highest murder rates attest to this fact.

It's an inalienable right because it is not for other human beings to determine who is and isn't to live. This is why murder is wrong. That is why abortion is wrong. If you can not even grasp the concept of what an inalienable right is, perhaps you need to do further study. That is not to be mean, as it is to suggest that you are now going against the very foundations of what we humans know "a priori": Every human, under standard conditions (i.e. disregarding death penalty, war, etc), has the right to life. It is an unquestionable fact that humans have the right to life. Even pro-choicers agree that humans have the right to life; why else do they then proceed to claim that fetus' are non-human.

If they are human, they have the right to life. This is a very simple fact. You are no longer adding anything to the debate, but simply asking "Why? Why? Why?". You remind me of someone who asked why "1 plus 1 is equal to 2". We can sit around all day long and ask ourselves why "1 plus 1 is equal to 2", but that is not going to get us anywhere. We just know, by virtue of all logic, that humans have the right to life.

Yes, it does. And that 1/3 such cells spontaneously abort is not of human doing, but of nature.

By caring about their own offspring, they are implicitly caring about the survival of the species. This is evolutionary theory 101. And again, even you admit that humans care about their own offspring. Now you need to ask yourself why are humans killing their own offspring, and it's not recognized as murder?

Abortion is illegal in the Philippines, but that's only one of the reasons why 80% of the Philippine pupolation is Catholic. nation.