Abortion

[Okay, maybe Mike Johnson is a competent parliamentarian.]

Do you favor abortion being legal at all stages?

This, and 'what are your feelings on sex-selective abortion?', are probably the first two questions that should be asked when attempting to argue that someone should nuance or change their position from this particular direction.

[Okay, maybe Mike Johnson is a competent parliamentarian.]

Pro-choice is the rational position - you can't say that the POTENTIAL for something is that thing. Abortion should be legal until life is in fact viable, which is up until the third trimester. To all pro-life posters, I ask of you - would you make masturbation illegal? Would you have people taken out of bed in the middle of night and thrown in prison for having a nocturnal emission? After all, sperm is POTENTIAL for life.

Sperm is potential for life in a different way, in that it's entirely unclear what a sperm might meet with, what other gametes might be involved. With a fetus the potentiality has already been realized in the first case and it's more or less clear what's what, since the gametes have already fused and the new person is already under construction.

Nobody is arguing that people should be punished for allowing individual gametes to do something other than fuse, and considering how biology works that is an absolutely ridiculous straw man.

[Okay, maybe Mike Johnson is a competent parliamentarian.]

Pro-choice is the rational position - you can't say that the POTENTIAL for something is that thing. Abortion should be legal until life is in fact viable, which is up until the third trimester. To all pro-life posters, I ask of you - would you make masturbation illegal? Would you have people taken out of bed in the middle of night and thrown in prison for having a nocturnal emission? After all, sperm is POTENTIAL for life.

Sperm is potential for life in a different way, in that it's entirely unclear what a sperm might meet with, what other gametes might be involved. With a fetus the potentiality has already been realized in the first case and it's more or less clear what's what, since the gametes have already fused and the new person is already under construction.

Nobody is arguing that people should be punished for allowing individual gametes to do something other than fuse, and considering how biology works that is an absolutely ridiculous straw man.

You can't draw a boundary like that though. Both are the potential for life, but a sperm isn't viable life and neither is a foetus until around 22-24 weeks.

The fetus is genetically identical, more or less, to the eventual person. The unfused gametes are not. I happen to think that that's a ridiculous way to define what constitutes a human life, but it's less ridiculous than some of the other ways.

[Okay, maybe Mike Johnson is a competent parliamentarian.]

IMO the process of the development of life begins at conception and ends at death. Anywhere in between, one shouldn't have the legal right to disturb that via killing. Sadly, there are events such as wars that get in the way of the ideal. However, as a total, no being has the right to determine whether a fellow being can live or not.

Out of curiosity, since you're using 'being' rather than 'human' or 'person' here, what are your feelings on human carnivorism? (Predation being inevitable in the world of nature, of course.) Necessary for most people's health, or regrettable and to be avoided on this same sort of basis?

[Okay, maybe Mike Johnson is a competent parliamentarian.]

Why are we having such a long discussion on this matter? I mean, abortion is an issue that has beaten to death, and frankly, we are all men here so who cares what happens with it? I will never understand politicians that walk around playing the holier than thou card with this issue. Keep it safe, legal and open to anyone that wants it. If a woman doesn't want a kid, no use forcing her to raise one because of some religious beliefs. Just let her abort it. Ive never seen men care so much about an issue that doesn't even concern us!

This is of course the natural emotive reaction of one who does not feel that a fetus is in some sense a person. There are of course others who do feel that a fetus is in some sense a person, and who would view this sort of argument as similar to arguing for ignoring crises in countries that we don't know anybody from.

[Okay, maybe Mike Johnson is a competent parliamentarian.]

I tend to put my trust in the medical professionals who have said a fetus is not a human life. I think at some point is becomes lift, but at conception, I haven't read anything that tells me it is a human life. Of course, I will probably go to hell for saying that, but oh well.

Uh, I don't really have a particular horse in this game (I'm very conflicted on the issue), I just think that the pro-choice arguments tend to have logical weaknesses. Just...for what it's worth.

[Okay, maybe Mike Johnson is a competent parliamentarian.]

Hypothetically speaking, what would our feelings be on the morality of aborting feti being gestated in vitro, were such a thing to become technologically feasible? They'd be, technically speaking, biologically independent of the mother (perhaps to a fault).

[Okay, maybe Mike Johnson is a competent parliamentarian.]

Hypothetically speaking, what would our feelings be on the morality of aborting feti being gestated in vitro, were such a thing to become technologically feasible? They'd be, technically speaking, biologically independent of the mother (perhaps to a fault).

You mean like in Brave New World, or how the Jove in EVE Online reproduce?  I could go for that.  Especially if we perfect cloning.

I was actually thinking of a Japanese sci-fi detective novel I just read, and the general desirability of such a situation (low, I think, as it happens) wasn't really what I was asking about. For the people whose justification of the abortion right has to do with the fetus' dependency on another body, in this situation would they, and why would they, think that this justification would hold up?