A Request Directed to Sciforums' "Atheists"

[PhysBang]

Interesting... so my act of NOT donating my organs (which I am still using, thank you very much) is somehow equatable to intentionally snuffing out a life?
Does this mean that by not donating my organs, I am guilty of murder?
Interesting leap of illogic there.

By not donating blood, you are allowing some people to die or to suffer more than they otherwise would. By not donating organs or bone marrow you do the same. Should you thus be forced to undergo this donation?

I would argue that it would be wrong to force you to do this, even though it would save lives, because you have the right to bodily integrity. I also think that women have the right to bodily integrity, that women should not be forced to do things with their body that they do not want to do.

If you happened to find yourself in a hospital for an operation, and someone comes in to the hospital that desperately needs a kidney, then even if you are in surgery already, doctors should not take your kidney without your consent even though it would save a life.

Indeed they do - however, so does the fetus.

But you wish to make sure that the rights of the woman are always below that of the fetus.

 

[Kittamaru]

By not donating blood, you are allowing some people to die or to suffer more than they otherwise would. By not donating organs or bone marrow you do the same. Should you thus be forced to undergo this donation?

I would argue that it would be wrong to force you to do this, even though it would save lives, because you have the right to bodily integrity. I also think that women have the right to bodily integrity, that women should not be forced to do things with their body that they do not want to do.

If you happened to find yourself in a hospital for an operation, and someone comes in to the hospital that desperately needs a kidney, then even if you are in surgery already, doctors should not take your kidney without your consent even though it would save a life.

*sighs* Again, the woman has their rights - including the RIGHT and RESPONSIBILITY to make the decision to have an abortion before doing so would become much more dangerous, complicated, and also painful for the fetus.

It is good to know that I am a murderer though, just because I do not currently donate anything (I have tried to donate blood, but due to my aversion to needles, my blood pressure goes up and they refuse to take blood while it is that elevated apparently)

But you wish to make sure that the rights of the woman are always below that of the fetus.

Meanwhile, you wish to strip the fetus of even the most basic of rights - the right to live.

 

[quinnsong]

@ All participants in this DF debate,

Has anyone brought up the legal ramifications if DF became status quo. Currently, if a person causes harm or death to an unborn fetus that person is charged with murder, how would DF affect this? How can the fetus count as a life inside the womb in this scenario but not when aborting at full term?

 

[Kittamaru]

@ All participants in this DF debate,

Has anyone brought up the legal ramifications if DF became status quo. Currently, if a person causes harm or death to an unborn fetus that person is charged with murder, how would DF affect this? How can the fetus count as a life inside the womb in this scenario but not when aborting at full term?

I think people are too caught up playing the "he said she said" game to think of the actual legal, moral, and ethical ramifications of it...

 

[billvon]

All I've done here is point out the difference between a cognitive response and a reflexive one, and then ask those relying on pain as a defining feature to define what they mean by pain.

?? Humans, of course, have both; your primary response to pain is a reflexive one (as is the primary response of a fetus or newborn.) Your statement above implied that 38 week old fetuses cannot feel pain the way adults can.

If an amoeba displays a withdrawl response to light does that constitute pain?

Not in the way we define it, since it does not have a central nervous system. We call withdrawal behaviors "tropisms" in animals without nervous systems.

I suppose there's a flipside to this. If we were to accept your arguments, and accept that killing something that can feel pain is wrong, then while we're outlawing abortions, why not outlaw eating meat?

That is EXACTLY the point I am getting at. Higher animals (like cows) do, of course, feel pain. Are we OK causing unlimited amounts of pain to animals? No - we consider that cruel, and would arrest anyone found torturing a puppy (or even a cow.) Are we OK with causing a minimal amount of pain during the slaughter of food animals? Some people are, some people aren't.

Note that the argument is never "well, cows probably can't feel pain." That would be an asinine argument, and if it was the primary argument meat eaters had, we'd all be eating vegetarian. The argument is "is it worth causing cows pain to gain us a benefit, specifically a source of food?" That is the right discussion to have, and indeed has been had ad nauseum here and on other forums.

 

[Captain Kremmen]

@ All participants in this DF debate,

Has anyone brought up the legal ramifications if DF became status quo. Currently, if a person causes harm or death to an unborn fetus that person is charged with murder, how would DF affect this? How can the fetus count as a life inside the womb in this scenario but not when aborting at full term?

Now you've opened up a nest of worms.
The laws differ from country to country, and in the US from state to state.

Currently, at least 38 states have fetal homicide laws. The states include: Alabama, Alaska, Arizona, Arkansas, California, Colorado, Florida, Georgia, Idaho, Illinois, Indiana, Iowa, Kansas, Kentucky, Louisiana, Maine, Maryland, Massachusetts, Michigan, Minnesota, Mississippi, Nebraska, Nevada, North Carolina, North Dakota, Ohio, Oklahoma, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, South Carolina, South Dakota, Tennessee, Texas, Utah, Virginia, Washington, West Virginia and Wisconsin. At least 23 states have fetal homicide laws that apply to the earliest stages of pregnancy ("any state of gestation," "conception," "fertilization" or "post-fertilization"); these are indicated below with an asterisk (*)..........
See link for all state laws:
http://www.ncsl.org/research/health/fetal-homicide-state-laws.aspx

Some have a special provision for feticide, others call it manslaughter, etc etc
It is incredibly complex.

 

[cluelusshusbund]

*sighs* Again, the woman has their rights - including the RIGHT and RESPONSIBILITY to make the decision to have an abortion before doing so would become much more dangerous, complicated, and also painful for the fetus.

Meanwhile, you wish to strip the fetus of even the most basic of rights - the right to live.

*nods* The problem as I see it though... yes, the foetus has rights as a living thing... but the woman carrying it does as well. The question is, whose rights should win out... and that's where the hangup is coming from.

My personal belief is, if you were irresponsible, got pregnant, and didn't do anything about it for over 6 months... well, that's on you. Killing the child at that point is NOT a way out.

HOWEVER

There are some issues with this. Rape, for one.

How does rape justify strippin the fetus of the most basic of rights... the right to live... especialy a late term abortion when it woud be painful for the fetus.???

 

[GeoffP]

But here we get to the misogyny of the anti-choice position

We do?

a woman is not a person because she has a fetus.

Or, conceivably, there are two people in the equation, the rights and needs of each needing to be considered? We could as easily go the other way with that rhetorical stance, so that the fetus is not a person because a mother is one. But why am I enjoined to view this as an adversarial issue?

It's not right to force men to give up the use of their organs to another man. We do not force people to give blood. We do not force people to hook their arteries and veins up to others in order to act as dialysis machines. So too it should be wrong to force women to have their body providing resources and risk for another being or another human.

Well, actually I believe that organ donation at death should be mandatory barring any pertinent or even impertinent (heh) religious objections. Similar for blood, except that donation from the healthy should also be mandatory. Society does not speak to these things, but I cannot speak of the unspeakable.

 

[GeoffP]

@ All participants in this DF debate,

Has anyone brought up the legal ramifications if DF became status quo. Currently, if a person causes harm or death to an unborn fetus that person is charged with murder, how would DF affect this? How can the fetus count as a life inside the womb in this scenario but not when aborting at full term?

Is that actually so? I haven't looked it up. Speaking for myself, that is a place that I will not go - at present, at least - and have not weighed. Is it double murder when you kill a pregnant woman? After the reasoned deadline - wherever we place that point - I suppose there's no way in which to frame an argument against it. Then again, we haven't posed a more supportable deadline, nor even rejected the current deadlines in our various nations, although a perusal suggests that they're all far too conservative. That would actually bring us into the 'personhood' debate.

 

[Trippy]

?? Humans, of course, have both; your primary response to pain is a reflexive one (as is the primary response of a fetus or newborn.) Your statement above implied that 38 week old fetuses cannot feel pain the way adults can.

But they can, and do exist seperately, which is part of my point.

Can you provide a definition of pain the excludes the brain dead?

 

[Tiassa]

Life and Personhood

Has anyone brought up the legal ramifications if DF became status quo. Currently, if a person causes harm or death to an unborn fetus that person is charged with murder, how would DF affect this? How can the fetus count as a life inside the womb in this scenario but not when aborting at full term?

It's not a question of "life". It's a question of "personhood". The laws pertaining specifically to fetal homicide are fetal homicide laws.

By assigning "personhood" to a zygote, those laws are essentially rendered moot, as that "person" is now covered by other laws.

And under Equal Protection, "other laws" means all of them.

I would ask you to undertake a thought experiment over the next week or so. It's fairly simple. Every time you are in an automobile, observe the speed. Compare this to the posted speed limit, and account for whether or not your state has a "basic speed rule" by which you can be found to be speeding while the vehicle is traveling at less than the posted speed limit.

Any time you have to slam on the brakes or otherwise decelerate the vehicle in such a manner that strains the seatbelt against your body, consider that if you were pregnant you might just have committed negligent homicide. Were you traveling above the posted speed limit when you hit the brakes? Were you driving under the posted limit but in excess of the basic speed rule? And if you happen to miscarry at any subsequent time during that pregnancy, is violation of the basic speed rule on that occasion worth life imprisonment?

This is the functional problem presented by LACP (FAP).

Compared to the refusal of LACP/FAP advocates to address these issues, dry-foot is a functional bright line at which one person does not exist inside another. Indeed, some find this observation so offensive that they would pretend the fetus somehow magically disappears from inside a pregnant woman when it achieves viability. Or, to take such propositions more seriously, yes, we could accommodate the person in utero's rights by Caesarean section delivery starting at the point of viability instead of termination. In this case, the state would assume all medical expenses for the procedure, as well as assume financial responsibility for the medical bills that might be incurred by premature birth. If we are to strip a woman's governance over her body because equal protection demands the zygotal "person" receive superior consideration under the law, such a savagery as I noted would, at least, be a compromise point. But as I said, it's a brutal compromise that will radically escalate the infant mortality rate as well as trade out abortion for major invasive surgery.

And as long as these advocates insist on denigrating a woman's human rights without reconciling that cost, yes, these insane "compromises" are potentially ways to settle the inherent conflict of one "person" asserting rights within and over the body of another person.

There are, of course, other compromises, but anti-abortion advocates don't seem to want to deal with those, and they all simply take the situation out on women.

Which, of course, is sort of the point of the anti-abortion argument.

 

[Kittamaru]

How does rape justify strippin the fetus of the most basic of rights... the right to live... especialy a late term abortion when it woud be painful for the fetus.???

Ideally in rape situations the abortion could be done nearly immediately

 

[PhysBang]

Or, conceivably, there are two people in the equation, the rights and needs of each needing to be considered? We could as easily go the other way with that rhetorical stance, so that the fetus is not a person because a mother is one. But why am I enjoined to view this as an adversarial issue?

I never said a fetus wasn't a person. I said it did not matter because we cannot force someone to give up the use or control of their bodily functions to another. All I ask is that you extent to women the rights you would extend to a man.

 

[Kittamaru]

I never said a fetus wasn't a person. I said it did not matter because we cannot force someone to give up the use or control of their bodily functions to another. All I ask is that you extent to women the rights you would extend to a man.

But in doing so, you force someone to give up their right to life... The fetus.

 

[Kittamaru]

I never said a fetus wasn't a person. I said it did not matter because we cannot force someone to give up the use or control of their bodily functions to another. All I ask is that you extent to women the rights you would extend to a man.

But in doing so, you force someone to give up their right to life... The fetus.

 

[GeoffP]

I never said a fetus wasn't a person. I said it did not matter because we cannot force someone to give up the use or control of their bodily functions to another. All I ask is that you extent to women the rights you would extend to a man.

But not to a fetus?

 

[cluelusshusbund]

Ideally in rape situations the abortion could be done nearly immediately

But... dont you thank the mother shoud have the right to choose abortion (even late term) in the case of rape... an if so... how does rape justify strippin the fetus of the most basic of rights... the right to live... especialy a late term abortion that woud be painful for the fetus.???

 

[GeoffP]

Putting on the brakes

Any time you have to slam on the brakes or otherwise decelerate the vehicle in such a manner that strains the seatbelt against your body, consider that if you were pregnant you might just have committed negligent homicide. Were you traveling above the posted speed limit when you hit the brakes?

Except of course that no one here is proposing such a thing. The concept of such an application is absurd in its vindictiveness. Or, tell us all which one of us is making that argument. What's that? No one? Oh.

Compared to the refusal of LACP/FAP advocates to address these issues, dry-foot is a functional bright line at which one person does not exist inside another.

It's more of a dim line propounded by those with no other ideas, based on the trite breakpoint of seeing a baby to prove a baby exists. Some of its defenders are so terrified of continuing the discussion that they often resort to a sort of talking around the other party in this discussion as if that will somehow protect themselves from being grabbed by the logic and shaken. I'm afraid that's not possible.

Or, to take such propositions more seriously, yes, we could accommodate the person in utero's rights by Caesarean section delivery starting at the point of viability instead of termination. In this case, the state would assume all medical expenses for the procedure, as well as assume financial responsibility for the medical bills that might be incurred by premature birth. If we are to strip a woman's governance over her body because equal protection demands the zygotal "person" receive superior consideration under the law, such a savagery as I noted would, at least, be a compromise point. But as I said, it's a brutal compromise that will radically escalate the infant mortality rate as well as trade out abortion for major invasive surgery.

Okay, and? Is your focus now on the insurmountable economics? Well, hell: in that case, maybe we could just throw welfare recipients and convicted criminals to the wolves also. No, really throw them to wolves, like in gladiatorial games. Certainly that would be a much more economic enterprise than the support of the avowedly tiny number of extreme late-term abortions, or of welfare recipients. What's that phrase again: from each according to his ability, to each... not really at all. And this would escalate the infant mortality rate, I see. Would it escalate it over than the direct mortality rate from aborting late fetuses, perhaps? Or perhaps the abortees don't tally that way, officially.

And as long as these advocates insist on denigrating a woman's human rights without reconciling that cost

Ooh, now these nasty not-quite people are denigrating women's rights with their parasite-loving ethics-seeking. Well, this accusation is old hat, dim bulb. I guess it doesn't matter.

There are, of course, other compromises

Those being? The proposition of an actual, real compromise would be a first for you on this thread. Describe these compromise positions which you now take up in place of the DF threshold which you've assured me at great abuse was really "bright line" and "functional". But now you say you have something even better? The world awaits your improvement on perfection, Tiassa.

, but anti-abortion advocates don't seem to want to deal with those, and they all simply take the situation out on women.

Which, of course, is sort of the point of the anti-abortion argument.

Which argument? There are several. Which advocates? There are many of those also. Or is your point really just to cheapen the discussion to a level at which you think you can manage it again?

 

[PhysBang]

But in doing so, you force someone to give up their right to life... The fetus.

As I said before again and again, persons do not get to force other persons to give up their bodily integrity, even if it means that someone dies.

People die because of lack of blood donations. But we do not round up people and force them to give blood. People die because they need a kidney donation. But we do not round up people and force them to donate their kidneys.

 

[Kittamaru]

As I said before again and again, persons do not get to force other persons to give up their bodily integrity, even if it means that someone dies.

People die because of lack of blood donations. But we do not round up people and force them to give blood. People die because they need a kidney donation. But we do not round up people and force them to donate their kidneys.

Yet you would do just that - force the child to give up its bodily integrity, causing death, against its will. What is the result of not doing so? Often death is not consequence the mother would have to face