LogFAQs > #964758024

ItsKaljinyuTime posted...

The horse men have in this fight is the same horse anyone who opposes abortion has: We don't like baby murder.

So... nothing that will ever directly impact you, and for some reason you think that opinion is equally valid to that of those that are directly impacted. You don't really have a horse in the race, you're just watching the race on TV and arbitrarily picking a favourite without putting anything at all on the line. My point stands.

ItsKaljinyuTime posted...

That's why the debate at the core of abortion is "So what is a 'baby?' At what point in the term does the organism cease to be an unimportant clump of cells, and something it would be unethical to kill?"

I've never been a fan of that approach. Whatever line is drawn is inevitably going to be highly subjective and mostly arbitrary. Instead, I prefer to start from the premise fetuses are humans and that killing humans is bad, but sometimes it's the lesser of two evils. Then, you start examining when killing somebody is okay, because there are countless circumstances in which people are justifiably killed every day and it's not at all difficult to fit abortion into that. In my mind, the most relevant comparison is taking somebody off of life support: You choose to end their life because you have reason to believe that their quality of life would be too poor and the burden they would place on others too great for them to want to survive. "What they would want" becomes a little harder to determine for pre-conscious people, but it's easy enough to make reasonable guesses.

Of course, having said that, I recognize that my opinion means jack all because nothing gives me the right to enslave a woman for the purposes of producing a baby I've decided to care about. Saving a life isn't an excuse, otherwise we'd forcibly extract blood from everyone that could withstand it and save countless lives in the process. People's right to autonomy over their own bodies trumps whatever good could be done by stripping them of that autonomy, and given the choice between respecting the autonomy of a conscious person and the autonomy of a pre-conscious one with zero chance of ever having a problem with that infringement, I'm going with the conscious person every time. I'm in favour of inducing premature labour instead of performing abortions after viability is reached, since at that point it's a pretty similar process with similar risks to the mother and there's therefore very little reason to kill the baby (medical necessity aside, of course, but I feel like that exception is a given when discussing the matter among competent people), but late term abortions are exceedingly rare to begin with. The vast majority of the abortions people actually want access to happen much, much earlier than that, and that's where most of the discussion is happening (as much as many pro-lifers like paint a picture of fully-formed babies being hacked to pieces).