Yes, I do value human life based on consciousness and the ability to feel pain among other things. Animals appear to share these minimal qualities with humans, and it is those minimal qualities, that I believe make it immoral to treat animals inhumanely. I am not a vegetarian, because humans are omnivores. I have no problem, killing animals for food after they have lived a good life and are killed with the minimal of suffering as possible. If only fetuses were granted the same rights as animals in our society. Further a human fetus if nurtured will develop into an adult, with the qualities you cherish that animals do not share. If it is morally allowable to take the life of a fetus, because it has not yet acquired these higher qualities, then it should also be morally allowable to kill infants and children, since they have not yet developed those traits. You have not stated your position on the morality of infanticide. What is your position?
My point was simple. The murder of an adult human is worse than the murder of a fetus.
Even if I were to grant you this point, which I won't, the murder of a fetus is still murder and is still a gross injustice.
You may consider me tasteless for ranking the relative tragedy of elective abortion and adult murder, but those who *equate* the two are engageing in the same unpalatable practice.
Once again, even if you are correct, defending the practise of abortion by saying, "Well it isn't the Holocaust", is not much of an argument. If you feel that it denegrates the memory of the victims of the Holocaust by comparing abortion to the Holocaust, then go ahead and be offended, but surely such a denegration (not the actual Holocaust) pales in comparison to the actual ongoing slaughter of unborn children. Or more simply, if comparing abortion to the Holocaust offends or disgusts you, then you should be outraged by the millions of needless abortions each year. Little in your posts would suggest such outrage.
Of course a person's history of choices, his waking desire to remain alive and agreement to not violate other's rights do not go away because of any temporary sleep state.
What does the direction of the arrow of time have to do with the intrinsic value of a human being? A fetus if allowed to be born, will surely in the future have a will to live. Why does a will to live have to proceed any right to live? Seems artificial to me. Also your premise that fetuses do not have a will to live is questionable. They at a minimum have a survival instinct, like animals. A more sophisticated will to live develops after birth, so your argument for abortion from a lack of a sophisticated will to live also applies to infanticide.
I don't know of any ongoing reseach to stop the death of the hundreds of millions of embryos each year. No one is trying despite it being one of the leading causes of human death. I assume that is because no one cares.
I suspect although, I don't know for sure, that there is a great deal of research into reducing miscarrages for women who have had multiple ones. Since the failure of the zygote to implant, in the lining of the uterus is a major cause of infertility, it would be foolish not to do research of this type, even if the motivation is for increasing fertility and not to save the life of the zygote. Also there are millions being spent on ways to keep 3rd trimester fetuses alive. Those techniques are directly aimed at saving a life, not at increasing fertility. As our medical technology increases it will be possible to push this back to the 2nd and 1st trimester.
We cannot agree. It denigrates not only the infinitely greater suffering of the holocaust but also all those qualities that distinguish humans from other creatures.
If you don't want to agree with me on that, then at the least fight with us pro-lifers against, infanticide, partial birth abortion, banning third trimester abortion, second trimester abortions, all abortions except when the life of the mother is at stake. Draw the line somewhere and start fighting at least some of the needless abortions each year. You can also join us in the fight to stop the current Holocaust (your definition, i.e. adults) that is going on as we speak, which is the mass killing of Christians in the southern Sudan. Anyone who feels as strongly as you do about the Holocaust, should also take up the cause of the persecuted Sudanese Christians.
The act of creating a tragedy adds to the tragedy itself. The combination of the two would create a personally paralizing situation for me. However, I would not stand in the way of my wife choosing to save her own life.
By having sex with your wife, unless one of you has been sterilized, involves potentially creating such a tradgedy. For women in the third world, but more importantly for us, women in our ancestry, the risk of death in pregnancy and child birth was substantial, but they still chose to take the risk. If women had not been willing in the past to take this risk, then the human race may have gone extinct. If you think this is a remote possibility consider that most developed countires are experiencing births rates lower than 2.1, the rate which is required to sustain a population. China's one child policy, (which in practise means one boy policy) is going to result in the collapse of China's population in the next 50 years. We all have responsibilities in this world and giving birth and the risks and burdens that go with it happen to fall to women. If they choose collectively to not fulfill their responsibility, then mankind will go extinct.
Thousands of vegetarians have proven that, in this country at least, you needn't be an omnivore. With such a grand opportunity to follow your morals, why wouldn't you jump at the chance?
If only fetuses were granted the same rights as animals in our society.
So abortion would be okay if fetuses were "killed with the minimal of suffering as possible"?
If it is morally allowable to take the life of a fetus, because it has not yet acquired these higher qualities, then it should also be morally allowable to kill infants and children, since they have not yet developed those traits.
Apparently you haven't met any children. My position on infanticide is that it is immoral. That is my position on elective abortion as well. This doesn't change the fact that for all the reasons I have in other posts, the killing of an adult is worse than the killing of a fetus. The suffering of an adult holocaust victim is infinitely greater than the suffering of an aborted fetus.
Once again, even if you are correct, defending the practise of abortion by saying, "Well it isn't the Holocaust", is not much of an argument.
You have the order all wrong. Someone in this thread initiated the comparision between elective abortions and the holocaust. I was responding to them, and surely by now you realize that my argument was not "Well it isn't the Holocaust".
What does the direction of the arrow of time have to do with the intrinsic value of a human being? A fetus if allowed to be born, will surely in the future have a will to live. Why does a will to live have to proceed any right to live? Seems artificial to me.
Seems artificial to me to. You should take it up with whoever made such an argument. MY argument on the other hand had to do with why we value other people, the human capacity for suffering, and most of all valuing those UNIQUELY human qualities over those that are shared by all vertebrates.
As our medical technology increases it will be possible to push this back to the 2nd and 1st trimester.
Even if so, it will still pale in comparison to the spontaneously aborted early (embryonic) products of conception. You are right about fertility research, but a woman trying to get pregnant is likely to have multiple, even unnoticed, spontaneous abortions. They wouldn't consider themselves to have fertility problem, and wouldn't qualify for therapy, until many consecutive attempts had failed. There has been a small amount of research done just to come to the conclusion that fertile women frequently abort spontaneously. There hasn't been any research to stop this from happening. I suppose no one cares about all these human deaths as long as women get pregnant within a reasonable time frame.
all abortions except when the life of the mother is at stake
What does the life of the mother have to do with it? We are talking about an innocent baby. Mom had her chance at life.
To you it seems perverse that I would argue such a relatively unimportant point. To me it is vitally important because it gets to the heart of dehumanization. The good people on this thread that I have argued with have stated their value for "human" life but have attributed it to the animal qualities of consciousness and pain response. None have cared to describe just what qualities makes humans unique and special. Surely those qualities are what would make a human more valuable than an animal. It scares me that people are afraid to recognize those qualities because in so doing they think that somehow they must also accept abortion or infanticide. They effectively deny the existence of humanness. That is a universal dehumanization at the conceptual level. That is dangerous.
Good points all. Thanks.