There is a scientific law of which you are not aware. It is a demonstrable scientific fact that all people die and therefore there are more people dying than can be saved.
You are either mistaken or this is some kind of informal treatment of what we conventionally mean by a law. Is this by any chance a school science project? This is what I would call a controvertible proposition, not a law, unless you can offer something more to tune me in to your basis for saying it. I need only prove that the population is growing, for example. But it's probably in that realm of impossible things to prove one way or the other, certainly not without clarification. You would have to establish a few things:
when is this true? At every instant of time? What constitutes
being saved? Is every person taking prescribed meds "being saved"? How about the ones getting a rigorous daily workout and eating healthy? How about those benefiting from seat belts, anti-skid brakes, better tires and advances in roadway engineering, traffic engineering, etc.? And how about all the people who used to die from occupational injuries who now use protective gear, harnesses, safety and first aid stations, improved chemical safety, better labeling, better containers, quality control systems, and on and on. This is a pretty wide open throttle for covering a huge array of things that might constitute "being saved", once you specify exactly what you mean.
The law brings forward a theory that says that because there are more people dying than can be saved, if we choose to save life, then we must choose which life to save.
Maybe you meant to say "theorem" although I'm not sure exactly how that even applies to this, since it's really just another proposition. you would have to be more specific here as well. For example, is this an extension of the specific meaning of "being saved"? Are you for example referring to a very narrow resource-limited application, such as in a hypothetical problem from operations research or economics? In many of the examples I gave above, no person is being "denied" just because "one person is being saved". The seat belts in my car were installed by the factory, and no person is lacking seat belts simply because I have them. I can think of countless cases like this.
In effect there will always be more people dying than can be saved, regardless of the fact we save some. Therefore there is always a supply of lives that need to be saved.
Since I have arguments against the premises leading to this conclusion I would have to say that it's unsupportable, at least without you saying more specifically what you mean by "being saved" as I've said above.
In practice there are 7 billion people born and dying.
You left out the main group - people that are neither being born nor dying. And you left out the time interval over which this is happening.
They are dying at the rate of 1.8 per second.
How does this relate to 7 B above?
What you need to know is how this applies to the question of population explosion. You need an exponential function that predicts the growth of population as a function of time. You need two pieces that combine to produce that graph: the exponential birth rate, and the exponential death rate. Then show how three fit together.
If we choose to save life, we must choose which life to save.
That I would tend to dispute as I've explained above. All decisions of life over death are not conscious ones. People die in their sleep. They get run over, shot, exposed to fatal chemicals or microbes, and on and on. It would be very hard to connect the total number of fatalities -- even in a small city -- to the availability of resources during an emergency or chronic illness or injury. Therefore it's very hard to tell what you mean here by "choice". Who is doing the choosing, and what percent of deaths (and, more importantly, people "being saved") are affected?
We may save a born life, or we may save an unborn life. If we spend 1 second saving a fetus then in the time period, 1.8 born babies, children or adults will die.
Are they mutually exclusive or independent events? Is one coin flipped to choose the fate of two people, or does Nature flip the coin for each person -- independent of every other person -- at about the rate of -- say -- one flip per heartbeat (approx 1X/sec?)
Because 7 billion people are in fact dying, we cannot save them all.
You just got through offering a death rate of 1.8 per second. At that rate, how long will it take for 7 B people to die?
The next thing would be to determine the birth rate, which is going to be slightly larger. Without even trying to estimate it (we can do that several ways rather quickly) , I'll just throw a number out there: let's say there are 1.81 births per second. Using that number, we'd have to conclude that 0.01 people are "saved" per second. Or 1 person is saved every 100 seconds. You see why it's hard to agree with you?
If we choose to save a born life, a fetus will die,
No, a "born life" gets saved every time the parents feed it, every time they keep it warm, protect it from harm, and so on. And none of that affects (or is affected by) the rate of fetal death, which, besides abortion, happens routinely in the course of pregnancy regardless of whether the folks across the street are on their toes about their own child’s safety or not. If you ever get to take a class in probability theory, you'll learn what
mutually exclusive and independent events are. A lot of the syllogisms you're propounding are being incorrectly cast as propositions that follow mutually exclusive premises when the nature that controls them is giving them independent statistics.
if we save the fetus a born person will die
Those are independent events, so nobody dies just because a fetus lives, and, as I mentioned, the available resources to save lives are not single threaded. They are built-in to the world around us in a rich network which is quite resilient and capable of multithreading all kinds of supports that preserve life, not even necessarily bringing a human into the loop. Health and safety systems, people taking care of each other, medical resources, etc, are not single threaded like you're constructing them here.
They do not die because we saved the other, they would have died anyway.
That statement is not clear.
The point is all about the choice. We can choose to save one or the other.
Not at all. The reverse is true. It’s very rare to have to choose one over the other. And choice in the matter is irrelevant unless you're talking about murder. At some point in each of our lives, no choices are in play at all. Normal death often entails the gradual crash of systems that simply can’t be stopped, or the cessation of some normal process quite suddenly (as a stroke or heart attack) which have no connection to any choices being made. As far as abortion is concerned, the average woman will choose to abort based on the rate of pregnancy, and based on whether that rate is above or below the average birth rate. (1.8/sec). I have no idea how widely the rate of pregnancy varies. You would not only need to estimate the rate of productive fertilizations, but also those that would be successful if not for contraception. Then you need to account for all forms of contraception. That's a formidable task. I don't think anyone could accurately process these sweeping general statements you're making. It would require vast amounts of highly tailored data sets that go way beyond present capacity of the average scale of technical research. In any case, you need to narrow down a lot of what you're saying.
The one we do not choose, dies.
No, because death is opportunistic. Look up some common causes of death and tell me which of them is caused by helping someone else live. The only cases I can think of are executions and murders -- those are done willfully. Show me one example of a person's death being caused by (What?) -- something -- being done to save a life. If you like, you can assume that my life has been saved X times by seat belts in Y cars over a period of Z years. Show me one scenario in which even one of the Y seat belts became a cause for someone else's death...
But when dealing with sets of born life vs. sets of unborn life, we cannot save both.
OK so you mean an expectant mother bringing a baby to full term can't deliver in the same maternity ward where a preemie is delivered, hooked up to a ventilator and treated against some common types of illness and injury preemies are susceptible to? I'd have to argue that those are independent events. It happens every day. It’s happening right now.
Why, because a choice to save a fetus is a choice to allow a born baby to die.
No, if there is any choice at all involved in saving them, the choice will be made to save them both. That's what hospitals are doing every 1.81 seconds or whatever the number is. (Plus we have to count the babies born out of hospitals. A few are born in vehicles on the way to hospital, but I guess we can neglect that number. They can have no relation to the rate of “saved fetuses” whatsoever, since they're not utilizing resources.)
We can never save all the born life in a set because by choosing to save the fetus at any point we are choosing not to save a born baby out of an infinite set of born life.
Sorry again but there is no infinite set of humans. As you mentioned before, the population is around 7 billion, and though it's growing, it's never infinite. And the rest of your logic needs rework for the reasons I've already mentioned.
We have not chosen to kill the born baby, we have chosen to not save it and to save a fetus instead.
Give me one example of someone choosing to kill a baby after it's born. I have no idea what you're referring to.
If we spend one second attempting to save a fetus, then in that second 1.8 born people will die. Not because we killed them, but because we chose not to save them.
How did we do that? Who did it? When/where did it happen? As I’m sure you know, once the baby’s head is in the birth canal, there’s usually no stopping it, and no one would dream of trying to stop it other than in some rare medical crisis. This is an automatic process, not something regulated by conscious decision at all. The decision was whether to have unprotected sex 9 months before, and then there was a second decision to bring the baby to term. But the rest is almost entirely automatic. And it’s entirely independent of a second woman’s decision to have an abortion. So this logic is missing the linking premise that leads to the conclusion.
From my experience the pro life movement is intentionally choosing to let born babies die regardless of the claim they are for saving life.
That's absolutely the strangest statement I've yet encountered on this site . . . and there have been some pretty weird things said since I joined.
or example for two years as this theory and law have worked their way through online peer review, pro lifers that are aware they are killing life, have chosen to continue to kill life. The fact that they save some and kill others is not a comfort to me. They have a choice of which life to save and they choose to let innocent born babies die.
Huh? You’ve been saying this for two years? Dang, I could have helped you work through this in 5 minutes. You have some strange ideas about peer review. But I guess I get your point. You're of the opinion that after engaging folks on this for a long time, it has become more correct. However you're missing a vital step -- fixing the logic to produce the result, which is not the same as arguing the various points in a forum. That, for sure, is a matter of
choice.
Pro lifers have a choice, they may choose to save innocent babies or they may choose to let them die. The fact is that if they choose to save fetuses, innocent babies die, if they choose to save babies, innocent fetuses die. My belief is that they should save innocent born babies, children and adults.
Fortunately for all of us who advocate for abortion rights, the pro-lifers don't choose whether we (or our children) live or die. The only ones I can think of are the few who bomb clinics. And that has nothing to do with the general logic you're putting forward. Murder is conscious, deliberated, but the choice of victim (esp a random attack) is often random/opportunistic. Moreso with accidental deaths.
I am going to attempt to post a link. So far I have been unable to link to my sources. So if you don't get the link, email me or PM me.
http://miscarriage.about.com/od/pregnancyafterloss/f/70percent.htm
The link shows that most "conceptions" die. I have tried to make it clear that there is a range from 70 to 99.5 percent that are --not-- miscarried.
That corroborates by earlier remark concerning the natural rate of failure to implant after conception. That number is believed to be around 70%. There again you see how life and death are opportunistic. No one is controlling this. No decision is involved.
Yes, the claim of the pro life movement is that all conceptions are "babies" but the fact is that many of the conceptions could have never been babies because as many as 60 percent of those that die do so because of genetic flaws that do not allow them to be born as babies.
I'll go with that, understanding that a few other things can go wrong besides genetic flaws, but I think that's a fair statement. I wasn't aware that pro-lifers were ever talking about all conceptions. I had assumed that many of them are aware of the natural rate of failure to implant, and that there are plenty of natural miscarriages/abortions that have less to do with the population rate than they do with the average number of fertilizations needed to produce one baby. And obviously the rate of protected sex has nothing to do with this; and the rate of unprotected sex is sometimes not exactly a matter of choice, but of failing to stop and take precautions because it detracts from the spontaneity of the moment, or someone forgot their pill, that kind of thing. That's some incalculable combination of planned and unplanned (and/or neglectful) parenthood.
The "Law of Charity" is not dependent on resources. Why, because it is only dependent on the choice of which life to save. It is assumed that any resources that are available will be used the save the life chosen.
I think your assumptions need a lot of work across the board. You have an impossible hill to climb trying to reduce all life and death cases to matters of choice. I can't imagine how you even came up with this.
Still, you are making a valiant effort to apply logic, if only in a formulaic way. But just remember: the logic also has to be valid. I think I'd have to judge this a no-go for the time being, but after a good overhaul it could at least be plausible. I have no idea what a fixed version of this would say. I have no idea what you actually believe and why you're posting this kind of logic. If you want we can try to make an enumerated list of premises leading to conclusions in order to help you find your mistakes of logic. That shouldn't be too difficult. That way I can point out the defects a little more clearly in case my posting style isn't helping you.
Also, just curious: what in the world even drove you to arrive at any of these conclusions? You remind me a little of another poster here who is a fundamentalist who would never try to argue against the pro-life folks, even by this unusual string of mistaken logic you're using. But he has a similar way of stringing things together that are not logically related, and then believing the result is correct.
