The Morality of Abortion

Philosophy Forums Society, Government, and Economics
1

Hi people - a last word on the subject perhaps.

Anti-Abortion seems quite simple on the surface, quite black and white. About life, and preserving it.

I’ll assume you’ve read, or participated on a few threads on the subject, and pick up where those leave off.

Basically, you end up in an arguement about 3 things.

  1. Wether a potential life is actually a life - to which you must say yes.
  2. Wether life has inherrent value and rights - to which you must also say yes.
  3. Wether life is unique in each iteration, and should be pursued whatever the circumstances of its birth. - To which - one final time - you must say yes.

One and two make abortion murder. Three severs the son from the sins of the father.

It is one, however, that brings the arguement’s downfall:

When does a potential life begin…? Ultimately, when the egg and sperm fuse. It’s tenuous, not yet alive in any sense of the word - but it has a chance if left alone, to become another soul.

Did I say ‘ultimately’ whoops - this is not the end of the story.

It gets worse, much worse.

If you believe, as I do, that the sex-drive preceeds rationality - then the act of not having sex becomes a purely rational decision - mind over matter. And as such - falls into the realm of moral choice.

When an animal of the female variety comes into season, she gets herself impregnated. Perhaps the choice of males this year is poorer than the last, it doesn’t matter, she selects the best one of a bad bunch - and gets down to the job. She never abstains. She is driven, as is the male.

A female human, has oodles of eggs, one a month chugging down the conveyer-belt. From a pro-life/anti-abortionist credo - she has a duty to get herself impregnated, if it were left to nature, with no rationality involved - she would. Only a rational, moral choice and an actively-selected none-action come between that latency for life slowly slipping down the tube, and its realization.

She must become pregnant at the first opportunity, and continue until the last. A biological car-manufacturing plant. Doing anything else is murder. And since we live in the age of science, the menopause can be offset - she must continue, till a shrivelled husk - she expires with her feet in the stirrups, a helpful intern still telling her to breathe.

But what of those other eggs, still lolling in her ovaries…? Don’t they too deserve a chance, now the whitecoats have the power…? Must she not seize the opportunity lest be branded an infanticide…? She must have them all removed, have them all fertillized in-vitro, implant them in groups and bear litters of life - create an army of infants, marching in step, bottles at port-arms.

And there’s more - if a single egg can split into twins… And those twins grow into separate beings in turn. Then each single seed of life carries within it the potential for a myriad more… Do not they deserve their chance at life…? Should we not split them all…? And split them again… And again…

  • And what of the male…? He has enough sperm swimming in his tubes to fertillize the planet - and a duty to each one. Each wank makes him a mass-murderer.

Silly, isn’t it…? Impossible, sick, moronic.

But still the death knell for any arguement on the morality of Anti-Abortion.

Yes - it’s freedom of choice. Yes - it’s murder. But it’s here to stay.

Tab.

2

Suddenly genocide seems like a damn fine idea…

:smiley:

3

I think the crux of the argument is that a human being has to be diploid to be human, according to the pro-lifers. Makes me wonder what they think about people with Turner Syndrome . . . .

Plus, there are plenty of organisms that get by just fine being haploid. But, to them, the fusion of the Mother and Father into one unified being marks the beginning of human life.

Seems pretty arbitary to me.

4

I just finished a course on biomedical ethics. Not surprisingly, one of the main topics was abortion. I’m not really pro-abortion per se. I think it would be a very difficult procedure to undergo.

At the same time though, I had a really hard time with the extreme pro life people that say life begins at conception and that all cells that contain human chromosomes are sacred.

I find it difficult to say that a fertilized egg, an ovum, or a sperm, is alive in a meaningful way. I mean, technically, all of our cells are alive. To say that every cell is sacred and deserves protection means we shouldn’t spit, or tweeze hairs, or nick ourselves shaving. (Although I would be happy never to nicj myself shaving again.)

I dunno, I think there are much stronger arguments against abortion than the whole sacredness of zygotes life begins at conception one.

cheers,
gemty

5

Pro-life people in my opinion fall into two types.

The first is the idealist that does not want babies to die (and that’s what’s happening) and believes somehow that the huge throngs of poor unloved children will be provided for. They are wrong because for whatever reason many humans do not care to of each other. So, their idealism clouds their judgment, but still their heart is in the right place.

The second type is based on Christopher Hitchens interpretation of Mother Teresa. He reported that her and her gang believed that suffering on Earth is a blessing from Jesus. In fact, painkillers were not given in any medical establishment run by her order, by her order, because pain is Jesus touching you. Read all about it in his book The Missionary Position. Anyway, these anti-abortion people want to have an Earth swarming with miserable poor people, partly out of their own sadism, and partly out of a belief that the lack of comfort and destruction of the western lifestyle through over population will bring people closer to god. Of course, they’re crazy.

Abortion is murder, but it’s part of having a certain organization to life.

Here‘s a question: Hippocrates talks about abortion all the way back to the 300s BC, and why is that? Clearly women wanted abortions even back then, and I’m sure well before that too. So, why have women wanted abortions for literally thousands and thousands of years.

If you answer that, then the whole issue will be cleared up I think.

6

Why is it, asking academically, that the ones who speak most often on the abortion issue, are not the ones who have to carry the child, i.e. the male?

Let’s face it, in legislation, the majority of the population is male, and these are the policy setters.

7

I still stick to what I said about abortion in this thread ilovephilosophy.com/phpbb/vi … p?t=149014 , Life or not its its going to negatively affect another life, especailly one so young as a teen I dont think it should happen.
Not to mention I believe most of the world believes that overpopulationg is going to happen, pro-life groups are just one step closer to that dream.

8

Mastriani,

I think that it’s just a case of distance from the situation. Also, there’s a lot of cultural “magic” talk about having a kid.

The fact is that having a baby can literally drain a woman’s component materials from her body. The most dramatic case that I can think of was a coworker’s son’s girlfriend. She was raised in one of those homes where the kids get fed boxed waffles and cheese doodles as a meal every night. So, he body had little calcium and other nutrients stored up, and as the baby formed all of her teeth fell out.

Having a baby is not a healthy or blessed experience. It can hurt you, kill you, and ruin how your body looks, thus making it unpresentable for future men that you might like enough to have their child.

I think that a woman with reasonable intelligence can figure most of that out. Also, there’s the fact for the rest of your life you’ll have to think about the kid (even with adoption) and the man that got you pregnant.

I bet that many men have trouble conceiving of all that, because they think that women should want babies, and do not know the facts behind the process.

Again:

I would love to have someone for or against explain why women have wanted abortions from the beginning of recorded history.

9

Why wouldn’t women want abortions? There are simply times when having a child is too difficult (that being a relative term).

I was talking to a friend recently who is working in Indonesia. She told me this story: a young woman was about to give birth, and the tribe doctor kept insisting that the child would be sick and die. When the child was born, the doctor insisted that the child was sick and would die soon . . . which was strange since my friend has some medical background and the child seemed fine to her. Nevertheless, because the child was ‘sick’, it wasn’t adequately cared for and died . . . because of the ‘sickness’ of course. A year later the woman married a man and was able to bear him quite a ‘healthy’ child.

Hmmmm, what do you suppose happened here? If you don’t provide the capacity for abortion, people will find work-arounds. Why do you think so many infants were exposed in antiquity? If the situation isn’t right for the woman, it makes perfect sense to drop the cargo. A child is a huge commitment, and if the female is unable to adequately provide for the child and herself, it’s the child that ought go. You can always make more later when the situation is better.

Whenever you confront someone with an ‘it was either me or him’ situation, the ‘him’ almost invariably loses.

10

Yes, abortion stops that kind of heinousness, that I’m sure would drive the population in further mental torment.

11

[size=150]POW [/size]!!!

If you accept potential human life is life → baby has equal rights to mother.

Baby hurts mother passively, without choice; mother kills baby, by choice.

[-X

Back to the life or not life argument…

12

Tabula Rasa:

You open by assuming that life begins at conceptions- i.e., when the egg meets the sperm.  Which is what the anti-abortion folks would content.  But then you leap into a series of obligations that men and women have to [i]non-fertilized[/i] eggs and sperm. How do you get from one to the other?

I assume the inherent wrongness of infanticide- people who have no problem with this practice will likely have nothing of interest (to me) to say on abortion, and vica versa.
A mother has an obligation to protect the life of her child. There are possible exceptions: If letting her child die, (or killing it) would save her own life or limb, then a person could argue either way. Most people wouldn’t agree that a mother can kill her child if the cost of the child would prevent her having a second car, or would make it harder to make her student loan payments, or if sitting home with the baby for a couple years would endanger her figure. A baby has no obligations at all, for the same reason that snakes and badgers don’t have obligations. If a baby crawling around accidentally pulls a plug out of a wall that results in the deaths of a thousand people, the baby is not culpable- whoever was supposed to be caring for it is.
Is the mother a ‘mother’ and the child a ‘child’ the day before the baby is born? I can’t see a good reason to say no. So there is at least a period of time (the day before birth) that the mother killing her child is a violation of her obligations, and thus immoral. So some theoretical abortions are wrong. The question to argue over is not the morality of abortion- at least some are inarguably immoral. The question to argue is how far back this period of time goes. How far back in development is the organism in the mother’s body fit to call ‘her baby’? Conception makes the most sense, simply because there is no other event to point to. It is a certain thing that happens in all cases of childbirth, before which things are dramatically different than after. If there was some universal point in the development of the fetus where we could prove it started having a soul, or starting thinking, or where a moment ago it was radically different than it will be a moment from now, then that would be a good point to choose too. As it is, the only such point of definition is conception.

So, if mothers have an obligation to protect the life of their children, then abortion from the point of conception on is a violation of that obligation and hence immoral- with the possible exception of a few cases that threaten the mother, which could be potentially argued either way. To ask whether or not abortion should be legal (even if immoral), one needs to ask what the obligation of the Government is to it’s citizenry, including both mothers and children. At the very least, Governments have demonstrated through practice that they have the obligation to prevent citizens from killing each other in almost all other cases.

13

TheAdlerian:

The same reason why some men have wanted to kill their wives from the beginning of recorded history- they are a huge pain in the ass.

14

Hey Ucc,

Remember “The Amorality of sex” The sex-drive came before the rational mind in evolution…?

Well - if abortion is ‘wrong’ because it ends a potential life through an active (moral) choice - and the rational mind overlays the sexual (pro-creative) drive, then the over-ruling of the ‘default’ animal-human’s drive to become inpregnated during a fertile period, by the ‘plug-in’ rational-human mind becomes another active (moral) choice.

ie: without the intervention of rationality, the default is the egg would become fertillized, and generate another life. Ergo - to abstain is immoral, ‘killing’ that potential life.

Clear as mud, I know. :laughing:

15

Tabula - It seems to me you have a compound statement there with two relevent clauses: ‘ends a potential life’ and ‘an active (moral) choice’. I think to an extent it comes down to which of those two clauses is the more morally weighty. Does choosing not to have sex constitute an active mroal choice? Certainly. Does it end a potential life? I can’t see how. Though, I have to admit, ‘potential life’ seems a confused term in the first place- abortion ends a life in the strictest sense. If the term ‘potential’ must be used, abortion kills a potential adult. It kills an actual living thing.

16

Look - say there’s a machine full of half the parts to make a car, and another machine full of the remaining parts, and together, every nine months, they automatically make a new car.

Tick-tock-click-clack - new car.

Now, say there’s a button on top of one or the other, which stops that machine interacting with its counterpart.

I press it.

No new car.

17

id like to hear what someone has to say about the difference between a sperm and egg that are one millimeter away from eachother and have not jumbled their dna into a little ball, and a sperm/egg that have fused together and initiated a series of chemical reactions.

you could say that when that dna jumbles together and initiates the chemical reaction that we call a person, god inserts a “soul” which has some sort of value. but lots of people will not care and not believe you.

so what is the non-religious difference between sperm/eggs and a sperm and egg that have combined? lets say i have some sodium and some chloride. and i really really need some salt because i just wounded myself on a deserted island and the only way to prevent infection is my chemicals and my chemistry set. some jerk throws my chemicals into the ocean. “well it wasnt really salt, yet… so i guess you technically didnt ‘throw away my salt’”. because that sodium wouldnt have done much and chlorine would have killed me. so… uh…

yeah i dont think so. he did throw away my salt because now i cant combine the two to create the chemical reaction that results in the useful final product. what is the difference between salt and a person, without appealing to religion? the difference is this: a randum mutation millions of years ago caused you to value yourself, “self-preservation”. some time after that, a random mutation caused empathy, which allows you to project your irrational self-preservation instinct onto someone else.

people love babies more than sperms and eggs because of irrational instincts, not because they are fundamentally different (unless, of course, you have formulated some sort of rational goal in which they play a part). so that means that, if we are to be as rational and thoughtful as possible in our pursuit of our goals, we must focus only on those goals that we actually want, in the long run, and not let our caveman emotions cause us to value and subsequently not destroy something in the short run that may hurt our long run.

so should we not spew sperms into our socks and let our eggs die in our tampons? of course we should! but ONLY if it is what creates the most happiness in the long run for all. and the only reason why that matters is because i have chosen that goal of greatest human happiness simply because i couldnt think of anything else to have as my goal.

sperms and eggs wont be very happy throughout their lives (by ‘happy’ i mean dopamine and seratonin spew in their brains, which they dont have) unless you combine them together to create the chemical reaction we refer to as humans (like salt, but slightly more complicated). the difference between sperms and zygotes is that when you calculate how much happiness will be created by killing it and comparing that to how much happiness will be lost by keeping it, you have to take into account how much potential happiness the zygote itself has (if you calculated the potential happiness of sperms, its negligible).

if you can know that the happiness of the zygote is not enough to cancel out the negative effect that it will have on not just the parents, but the future children of those parents, and the victims of all the crimes that the crackbaby will commit, then there is literally no rational reason to keep that kid alive. unless you have some other goal besides greatest human happiness, which im very interested in hearing.

the ONLY problem is being certain that the net effect of that kid will be negative. i am sure that it is often negative, and i think the mother is more capable of predicting this than the government.

uccisore,

should we do things that cause a lower amount of human happiness? or is the risk that our prediction will be wrong simply too great? or is there some reason why we should value literally anything in the world other than the amount of happiness that it creates?

i think your goal HAS to be either one or the other of these if it relates to killing babies: you love all babies because they are intrinsically good, you want to create them at all costs and masturbation should be stopped, or you only love those things that create the most human happiness, in which case some babies should be killed.

18

You blew up my car!!!

No, I don’t think so. I don’t think ‘potential life’ or ‘potential cars’ even need to enter into the conversation. Kill all the potential lives you want- everything you do, all the time, probably does so, and that’s why your set up leads to such absurd conclusions. Abortion kills something actual- granted, that actual thing has potential to become much more than it is current. But ‘potential life’ doesn’t apply.

19

Future Man:

Sometimes our obligations seem to cause us to, yes.

How happy is a rock?

20

Weeell - its called universalizing the rule I think. Basically, if something aint moral at point z, it can’t be moral at point a.

But you know that right…?

So if I can link life in the womb (which is none-independent of mom… ie still potential) to the potential for life in egg/sperm, as, I believe, I have, then, I can quite happily run that damn ball right into the ground, as again, I believe, I have. :wink: