this post was submitted on 19 Oct 2024
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Abortion should be legal in all cases, but a fetus becomes a unique individual when there is clear, identifiable, brainwave activity.
If there's no brainwave activity, it's not a life, no matter how many weeks old pre-birth or how many years old after birth.
The thread replying to the parent comment is a good example of how restricting abortion access requires people to arbitrarily decide definitions of when a fetus "becomes human."
It's best to leave that decision up to the pregnant person in consultation with their medical providers.
This is another arbitrary definition of personhood. That doesn't mean it's wrong. But there are other (equally arbitrary) definitions that are reasonable too. (And there are a bunch of unreasonable definitions, but we don't need to go into those.)
The one that chaps my ass is the whole "abortion stops a beating heart".
Yeah, and with the appropriate chemicals and electricity, you can make a heart beat in a petrie dish, that doesn't make it "life".
https://www.theguardian.com/science/2014/feb/02/stem-cell-research-heart-disease-long-qt
On the flip side, I personally had an incident back in January where my heart stopped for 8 seconds. There have been a few other smaller pauses since then, 4 seconds here, 5 seconds there.
So clearly a heartbeat isn't entirely what makes you, you.
Respectfully I disagree. If one grants that abortion should be legal for rape/incest/LOTM (~1%) then it comes down to the other 99% which is what both sides actually care about. At this point the conversation shifts to personal liberty, bodily autonomy, stage-of-development or, in the case of Roe v. Wade, privacy. While there is some clever pilpul regarding ethics and/or the "dilemma" an unexpected pregnancy creates, in the overwhelming majority of cases the abortion decision comes down to convenience. Convenience meaning the prevention of struggle. Having to alter ones life or career to acommodate the needs of a(nother) child. It's no secret that sex causes pregnancy however many people feel they shouldnt have to deal with the consequences (women AND men). Human life is the most precious thing on earth which means it needs to be treated with the utmost care from conception to repose.
Abortion creates a culture of death. Assisted suicides would almost certainly not be a thing if abortion wasn't normalized first. It's no surprise that abortion traces its modern roots to the eugenics movement.
Furthermore something that is rarely discussed is the psychological fallout from abortion. It can be devastating for both women and men.
There can also be devastating psychological fallout from not getting an abortion, which would be why many people believe it should be a choice that the people involved get to make about themselves, rather than forcing it on them.
About the rest of your argument, it hinges entirely on a detail that it doesn't mention: when does an egg become a human? If sex caused literal newborns to be delivered by storks the next day, of course no one would be arguing to kill the child, even if that was by far the most "convenient". However in reality there is a transition from a mere collection of cells no more special than any other collection of cells in the body (besides their potential for further development), all the way to a fully developed baby. The egg and sperm cells alone are clearly not human, while a baby clearly is. So then where along this gradual process can we first say that it is a human?
And this is the real crux of the debate. There is no point convincing people that it's bad to kill their unborn baby via abortion, because they don't believe there is a baby to kill at all yet, but rather a collection of cells which will eventually form a baby. By removing these cells, you stop any potential for a baby to be formed, just like wearing a condom stops the potential for a baby to be eventually formed, by keeping the egg and sperm separate.
"Stage-of-development" is a flawed argument because it presupposes that some qualifications must be met before an embryo or fetus reaches a status of personhoood when in reality the "clump of cells " has all the genetic instructions it requires to proceed through all stages of development at conception. Entertaining the idea that it somehow matters less because it is smaller, less developed, dependent on the mother etc is the pilpul I was talking about. If it wasn't a human then an abortion wouldn't be necessary because a dog, bird or fish embryo would die immediately.
It is not like contraception (e.g. a condom). A gamete on it's own will never develop into a human under any circumstances.
We are talking about people (man and woman) who decide to have sex and don't want to deal with the logical, predictable outcome. No one is forcing them to do anything. They have created this situation for themselves. It's that simple. The rest is just mental gymnastics for them not taking responsibility for their actions.
The only intellectually and morally honest argument for abortion is "I don't care".
Of course some qualifications must be met to qualify for a specific term, that's exactly what definitions are. You yourself are presupposing your own qualifications ("having all genetic instructions") which you are thrusting upon everyone and assuming it must be the one true definition. But your definition is also deeply flawed. If I have some stem cells harvested from my bone marrow, are those stem cells also a human? If I let those cells die, am I killing someone?
Or to take a step further into hypotheticals, if I store an egg and a sperm separately in a device built to automatically mix them together in a year from now, is this device now a human? Because it matches your definition of containing all genetic instructions, and if left alone then it would eventually produce a fertiliser egg, which you claim is already a human.
A human individual is an incredibly intricate thing, and to try reduce its definition to something as mundane as "contains human genetic information" is the actual mental gymnastics here.
This is blatant false equivalence. Trying to claim that if the embryo is not of some other animal, then it must be a human, as in an individual life. It is obviously a "human embryo" but that does not necessarily mean it is "a human", just like a "human fingernail" is different from a "chimp fingernail" and yet is still not "a human"
This is honestly a frighteningly cruel outlook. If a rock climber has a fall and is dangling with a broken arm from his rope, should we just leave him there to deal with it himself, since it was his choice to take the risk of climbing? Of course not! Despite his own actions causing his predicament, we as a society still provide care where we can. Hospitals tend to the wounds of idiots who play with fireworks, governments (in many countries) provide care to homeless people who lost all their money gambling. Just because a couple takes a risk which goes badly, does not justify revoking their access to care.
Again, this whole debate comes down to a definition of when a fertilised egg becomes a live human. And if you want to have any actual impact in this debate, then you are going to have to do better than pre-assuming some definition and dismissing anyone who disagrees with it.
Why? People dont usually abort things that are dead and if it's not human then there's no need for an abortion. I reject the false equivalency objection that somehow a human embryo is not "human" the same way I reject that a toddler is somehow less human than an adult.
This "live human" stipulation is a pilpul fabrication meant to inject moral ambiguity. This allows abortion to be morally justified as an acceptable practice at least up until some arbitrary stage of development (even though it's clear that pregnancy, barring complication, means a baby is on the way.)
You will never get consensus on your "live human" criteria. That is by design.
I posit instead that the crux of this debate comes down to the sanctity of life and personal responsibility. Calling me cruel for "denying care" is odd considering I'm arguing to prevent the termination of healthy pregnancies conceived with full consent and knowledge of the man and woman involved. A pregnancy isn't a "risk ending badly" it's a blessing and a responsibility (for both woman AND man).
To break it down simply -- babies come from sex. More specifically they come from the product of sucessful egg-sperm fertilization (e.g. the early stage embryo and fetuses that are aborted by the millions each year) This occurs in the womb which is naturally equipped for this process. It's pretty clear what is going on.
Determining termination based on some level of cognizance is an arbitrary standard and frankly one that opens the door for other judgements that are only limited by imagination, rhetoric and charisma.
At what point does this evolve into screening fetuses, altering genomes and treating early human development like some science experiment. Aldous Huxley, a eugenicist, explores this future in his novel Brave New World.
At what point would you consider it to be sufficiently brain so that its activity is brainwave activity?
When the activity can be actively measured. Terry Schiavo, for example, stopped being a person when her brain stopped.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terri_Schiavo_case
You can measure electromagnetic activity in an unfertilized egg. The question is when does this activity become brainwave activity.
We have ways of measuring brainwaves, it's not a mystery.
I never implied that we didn't. I'm telling you that we can always measure something and asking you to clarify which of these measurements constitute brainwave activity. Is the activity in the ovum a brainwave? Is it after the first signs of a notochord? After the notochord disappears completely? First cell to differentiate to eventually become part of the neural tube? When the neural tube starts bulging out? When there's enough bulging to see three district vesicles? Or five? Appearance of the first neuron? Or when neurogenesis stops? Or when the nervous system is sufficiently developed to take control of certain bodily functions? Or the activity when the nervous system is "fully developed" as an adult? Or something else?