I understood your example and it is appropriate when comparing apples to oranges. You could take it as far as a sperm cell on the floor. the value of an embryo is only in proportion to the potential for it to become a baby you could say that a poor drug addicted teen street prostitute has less value than a teen the same age who is studying medicine to help people in a university the ethics of childbearing go beyond the stage of development, the ethics of a pregnancy center around giving birth to a baby not the stage of development. the ethics issue is how much we value human reproduction. that is the question that needs to be pondered and thought through. are the primitive tribes living in Yap using stone money less valuable than the NBA stars or the people who work in the Med Center? are they equally human? an embryo in a mother's womb is not a baby. but the reproductive process is key, most important, of highest value- part of the growth process of every valuable individual person on planet earth once we de-humanize infants, at any stage... an embryo is potentially a human, there is no need to argue the value of that... it really adds nothing to the circumstances of teen pregnancy and mid-term abortions. There is no debate between the value of an embryo and a 3 month old child The debate centers around human reproduction and the value of bringing a pregnancy to birth. Doctors all over the world make their living fighting hard to make that happen successfully.
Fundementally all ethics have basic truths that can be found. they might not appear at first but truth is worth searching out. in the case of an embryo and a baby you have apples and oranges, they are different, Ottomaton pointed that out, so you have to frame his ethics question correctly to see the truth many people don't frame the gospel correctly and miss the ethic, that's all
we use to call these imagine 'ethics' questions situational ethics. they are designed to actually steer a person around the real ethical issue. they go something like this... on one side is a starving baby that is about to die on the streets of Bombay on the other side is a young Dr. who is saving many lives in a hospital you can only save one... blah blah blah the ethics question really isn't which is more valuable the baby or the Dr. 2 humans are equally valuable as persons the real ethic question is 'should man even place himself inthe position to make these type choices?' that is actually at the heart of the ethics of the abortion debate.
Well said. At its most informed level, both ends of the debate have probably pondered about the point where life begins far more than the average person will ever imagine. I think the test tube argument/solution is a red herring because even if every form of trouble or toil was removed from a pregnant and unwanting mother, if she doesn't want the fetus, then it will not exist...ever. And at that technological point, Otto's hypothetical becomes weighted to the embryo side. Let's say those embryos are in vials that simulate a mother's womb and carry the same risk percentage as a "natural birth rate". So then you can make a conservative ball park that 5 or 6 of those test tubes will become babies independent of outside assistance. Even if the rate of birth to term is 30%, it still makes the question difficult to consider and answer. The point of conception and how we value our own humanity should always be difficult thing to consider. Moralizing with technological or judicial convenience will not effectively solve the issue or lay rest the simmering tensions between the two sides. Also, religious conservatives would further their cause through sensible and reasonable extensions of their deeply held beliefs instead of repeating verses through rote (not that anyone here has been guilty of such things). How do they answer questions of the social consequences of outlawed abortion? Throw them all in jail? Ignore the coat hanger abortions or the trips to other countries? Hold a unofficial surveys have some semblance of reliable statistics? That would be where their sense and reason kicks in order to convince undecideds. We live in a crowded world with highly opinionated people. There's no easy answers to that. Technology and civil government makes things easier, but it can not solve social issues and its causes. Getting a president to stuff partisan judges will not get the job done or make those extremely interested parties sleep easier at night. It'll take a lot of hard work and patience to rewire our cultural perceptions of life, but it could just be insane to step in front of a moving train.
It used to be... for the longest time until it got cloaked in a women's rights issue. No right is more sacrosanct than the right to life of that little girl getting aborted.
... but it doesn't necessarily follow that the other is not valuable and sacred. There would be a natural emotional connection to the already-born child and I would guess that the 9 embryos in a jar would already be dead so I'm not sure what the deal is...
Hence why I said 'more' valueable/sacred, and not which is the valuable/sacred one to you. And Otto already addressed the "dead embryos" thing..
Obama wants to abort all white children and extend the right to abort to the 22nd trimester. Biden is already enlisting scientists to develop an "Aborta-Ray"tm that you can shoot at pregnant women to terminate the babies inside them. Since Obama is a Muslim, killing unborn babies gives him an erection. and McCain wants to give criminals guns so they can rape your wife and Palin wants to take away the right for you to abort the rapists' baby. And McCain wants that baby to grow up and rape you, and then you will fall in love with the rapists' son but if you want to marry him, McCain will invoke death penalties to gays who want to married (but tax incentive given to rapists who marry their victims). So, come November 4th: DON'T VOTE OR YOU WILL DIE
Let's say we are both married and one of our wives HAD to die-- MY choice. I'd pick YOURS to die. Could you blame me? Tough but clear choice. Does that make your wife any less valuable.... to anyone except me? Why should MY choice be so all-important when it comes to someone else's life? Should your soon-to-die wife be given a choice? How about her mother? or her friends? or her co-workers? or even you? As regards otto's hypothetical, I think we agreed actually. Otto's scenario made the embryos sound like pickled eggs on the counter-top at the Fast Mart. His scenario asked us to pick one. I explained why I thought most would pick the already-born baby-- a naturally generated fondness for someone you've heard coo and laugh. Part of the issue is our failure to recognize the humanity of those things in the jar. That doesn't make it okay to de-value them but it does explain a wanton disregard for their life.
So you can kill babies hypothetically but I can't kill (not let her die) someone important to you hypothetically? Classic.
LOL - the Pro Life crowd is all about forcing their views on people and forcing women to have the baby. But, once that baby is born, they are not about supporting it, no way....those people had the baby, they are responsible. I mean who is doing the most responsible thing here? The person aborting the fetus because they don't want nor can they support a baby? Or... The person putting another mouth to feed into a society that will just let it fall through the cracks? Amazing the hypocrisy. DD
Easy, rhester. I would kill the "wicked ones," or die trying, before I would allow that to happen to my only son. And I have an only son, who I love dearly.
As long as you realize that you are wasting time, energy, and money when those efforts could have a lot more impact if they were directed at reducing unwanted pregnancies rather than fighting for a paper ban that would not solve anything and would reintroduce a whole host of new problems.
To me isolating the argument away from if an embryo is "yet human" by saying we should have an inherent respect for the process of reproduction is sort of moot. I have been disrespecting part of the process of reproduction since I was 11 and found a particularly appealing page in the lingeree portion of the Sears catalog. I know that sounds like I am being mocking, but a sperm is a potential life. And there are people who believe its wrong to release it recreationally instead of for procreation. As is the egg before fertilization and before being passed out of a woman's body each month. So assuming that we are o.k. with having sex for recreation instead of exclusively for procreation, then the question of when those two potential lives becomes an actual life is relevant. I realize there are people who have different takes. Some feel that sex for recreation is o.k. but only within the confines of marriage. Even if we say that an embryo is a baby the second sperm meets egg (which doesn't seem to correlate with what I know of science) it still lives only as a part of its mother. If a baby is wanted then that is a miracle for the mother, if it's not wanted it's more of (as unpleasant as it is to say this about a baby) a parasite. Do we even have a mechanism for ensuring a mother take a baby safely to term, if we think society should be doing that. Are we going to station an armed guard for each pregnant mother we think is at risk of not wanting to carry her child to term. So we can make sure that she doesn't find a back alley somewhere, or try to kill the baby with alcohol or drugs, or just continue her alcohol and drug habit. How about proper prenatal care, we gonna force her to seek it out. For me personally the very idea of abortion is unpleasant. And I think society should fight to make it as rare as possible. To me that is an effort that includes fighting poverty and improving sex education (and making it realistic not the parental head in the sand theory of if we tell kids about sex and contraception, it is going to make them think we approve of them all becoming sexually active and promiscuous.) Making the relatively safe medical procedure illegal, especially during the first trimester, doesn't seem to me to be something that will produce an overall societal good.
I find it hard to call people responsible when they decided to do the only thing that could get them pregnant, even though they didn't want to get pregnant. One thing I think most people agree on, is that (most times) having an abortion is not a good thing. Even if a woman would chose to terminate her unborn childs life, she probably isn't happy about it (even if she believes it is the best thing for her). So the most proactive thing here would be to help women make better choices for their bodies before they get to the point where they are pregnant.
