[Sandwich]

Here's the full, unedited video if anyone cares to take the time to watch:

While said in a very dismissive way, I'll take it. "How good for them" and hesitating to say that saving lifes is "good" aside, I think the point of the thread is done and a consensus has been reached. I hope this thread doesn't trail off to a never ending discussion on the merits of abortion. Because that is mostly tiresome and I'll leave at New Horizons speed.

If saving lives was the holy grail of goals like all these arguments seem to indicate it is, then why is abortion a thing?

It does not matter what you think on the subject, because what you think does not matter to someone else's beliefs.

So it is here.  There has been no ethical or legal violation, This discussion is pointless in that light.

Ethics are relative. As for the possible legal violation, we'll apparently find out... reports are that Gov. Bobby Jindal of Louisiana has instructed Louisiana’s Department of Health and Hospitals to launch an investigation.

[karajorma]

Given the amount of sheer dishonesty involved in this report, I think we should just close the thread and stop publicising it any further.

[Luis Dias]

If saving lives was the holy grail of goals like all these arguments seem to indicate it is, then why is abortion a thing?

I'm sorry Sandwich, but this is a question worded in bad faith. Most doctors are fervent defenders of lives throughout the world, and most of them are also pro-abortion. It's not an incompatible worldview, it's just not absolutist to the single fetus cell. If you cannot understand that most pro-abortion people do in fact believe in saving lives, and can only see and regard these people as monsters, then I just submit you are astonishingly wrong about your judgement of these people and can only hope you get to see that by yourself.

Take care.

[General Battuta]

If you want to stop abortions, give out free IUDs in every high school (this is not just rhetoric but actual effective intervention)

[General Battuta]

I'm sorry Sandwich, but this is a question worded in bad faith. Most doctors are fervent defenders of lives throughout the world, and most of them are also pro-abortion. It's not an incompatible worldview, it's just not absolutist to the single fetus cell. If you cannot understand that most pro-abortion people do in fact believe in saving lives, and can only see and regard these people as monsters, then I just submit you are astonishingly wrong about your judgement of these people and can only hope you get to see that by yourself.

Take care.

Reasoned, pluralist debate about abortion is about as close to impossible as any issue I've ever seen, in no small part because it touches on the unsettling and fascinating truth that all moral systems are built on axioms that can't really be reduced or logically justified. The universe doesn't distinguish between life and nonlife — there's no code in physics to recognize and tag a living thing. Arguments about the capacity to suffer founder on our inability to understand qualia.

It's up to us to draw lines — and a good way to defend your line is to claim it was delivered to you by higher truth.

That makes for a very messy issue.

[Luis Dias]

That might as well be the philosophical status of our current predicament, but empathy has been known to produce miracles of transposing "drawn lines" and that's something no philosophy or religion can help achieve. It must be achieved by each one in their own life's experience.

[Phantom Hoover]

miniature american flags for all!

[Scotty]

Ethics are relative.

It never ceases to amaze how you can say this without irony, and continue to back up your opposition to abortion as a moral imperative.

[Luis Dias]

Don't be so hard on him. He means that ethics are relative to your moral framework. His moral framework does not allow any of this stuff. For his morals, this whole discussion is just totally gone mad from the get go.

[General Battuta]

I hope his morals don't include falling for calculated clickbait, manipulative editing, and scummy ethical practices that drag down the whole political conversation.

[pecenipicek]

Ethics are relative.

It never ceases to amaze how you can say this without irony, and continue to back up your opposition to abortion as a moral imperative.

From where he is from? Quite possibly.
From some of our points of view? **** no.

My point of view on it?
Its nice that the religious point of view gets heard.
Doesnt mean it should affect the secular government or people who do not share your opinion or beliefs.


Last time i checked, 5 long years ago mind you, the general concensus in my part of the world was that the child is not considered a "person" until the moment of birth. Also i think there's also the limit of abortion up to 3 months into it due to danger to the potential mother...
Also, having personal experience with the matter, its the ugliest decision we've ever had to make. But it was that or bring up a child in an even worse situation than either of us grew up in.
It was however our choice. The mind knows and understand, but the heart does not. If you can live with the consequences of your decision, good. In either case.
If not, seek help.

[zookeeper]

Reasoned, pluralist debate about abortion is about as close to impossible as any issue I've ever seen, in no small part because it touches on the unsettling and fascinating truth that all moral systems are built on axioms that can't really be reduced or logically justified. The universe doesn't distinguish between life and nonlife — there's no code in physics to recognize and tag a living thing. Arguments about the capacity to suffer founder on our inability to understand qualia.

Although it was hardly your point, it ought to be said that capacity to suffer need not be an issue with abortion. We are after all capable of killing people in various ways that are quite certainly painless, might as well apply those to a fetus as well just to make sure (I'm sure at least some current methods already qualify).

Not that I think that'd satisfy an anti-abortionist.

[Scotty]

It's the general line of thinking "I think this is wrong so you shouldn't be allowed to do it" that gets my goat about it.  Why on Earth should I care what the proverbial you or your God care about when it comes to my actions and beliefs?  Obviously there will be consequences, but it's emphatically neither a right nor a privilege for anyone to determine what I think is right for me.

[Bobboau]

The Bible has passages that can be understood either way if you take them far enough out of context.

one of my major (if probably unobtainable) goals in life is to know the truth, taking things out of context to intentionally misrepresent them is in opposition to this goal.

The ones referring to God forming, knowing, and destining us in the womb are more specifically relevant to the "When does life begin?" question than are the ones about life being breathed into post-birth now-dead people.

I have seen some passages that might imply some predestination or foreknowledge on God's part. that would be consistent with god being everywhere and knowing everything and being timeless. I do not see how they establish the point at which us temporal beings would consider a human life to begin. To god each human life might have begun when he created the universe and are eternal by his perception, because he is outside of time and we have all always existed because eventually we did.

That iron ore, under the natural course of events, will never become a robot. However, all throughout nature, conception leads to miniature duplicates of the two creatures that conceived it.

That ore was made into a robot through - if I dare say it - intelligent design... blueprints, if you will. The ore was the raw material that needed external shaping and manipulating to become the final product - a robot.

That external shaping and manipulating - the blueprints - are part of our genetic code (regardless of whether you believe in evolution, creation, or even both). Our bodies are processing, manufacturing, self-repairing, and self-replicating factories all in one (ok, the self-replicating part needs two factories). We are what we eat is very true if you think about it. Where does the material that composes our bodies - at any stage of life from conception (or even the makeup of the sperm and egg before that) onwards - come from? Our food. Those raw materials are broken down by our bodies and converted into whatever the body needs it to be.

So technically, you could take pictures of your food and say that's "you" if you want. But without those blueprints, that food will never become people any more than that ore will become a robot. Once those blueprints are in-place and being followed, the situation changes. Robot components are constructed and awaiting final assembly. Egg and sperm have merged genetic code and are developing into the "final" form.

So just like those robot components on the conveyor belts in the factory are inevitably going to become a robot (barring intervention), so to are the combined egg and sperm going to become a person (barring intervention). The parallel can only be taken so far though - robots can be switched on and off, whereas that egg+sperm develops and grows from the moment of conception onwards (both before and after birth).

not following, but you seem to TL;DR it here

I guess what I'm saying is that while the comparison is useful to extent, it ultimately doesn't help. Iron ore is to robots what food is to people. A conceived fetus has no real robotic parallel - the closest thing would be robot components undergoing final assembly, but there are still differences.

ok, how about this. there is a particular arrangement of matter that we call a human. It comes about via a natural process which starts by an act of free will and that process can be halted after this act of free will.
likewise there is a particular arrangement of matter we call ice, which is separate from another of arrangement of matter we would call water. Ice can be made as a natural process started by an act of free will. all I have to do is leave a glass of water some place cold enough. at some point we stop calling it water and start calling it ice. The only point I am trying to make here is that there is a transition from one to the other. Likewise there is a transition between when there is not a human and when there is. defining that point is the entirety of the issue here and I do not see how or why conception couls or should be considered that point in time, just because it is the start of a long drawn out cascade of natural processes that eventually lead to a human life. when you light the fuse to a bomb you haven't set it off yet. You seem to be conflating the point in time in which a process started and the point in time when it ended.

Just like the woman in the video said, there are laws, and those laws are lent to interpretation in different ways. It depends on what your interpretation is.

The whole point of what I said was to ask how can you be so certain, and you seem to be answering me here with "you can't be so certain" and yet you are.

[Luis Dias]

It's the general line of thinking "I think this is wrong so you shouldn't be allowed to do it" that gets my goat about it.

TBF, and I don't mean to be annoying here, but isn't that the most normal source of our own laws and morals? We believe something is wrong and so we outlaw it. You think murder is wrong and so you also think it should be outlawed. This is not something that should get your goat about it, it's normal moral reasoning. The problem here is one of amazingly different moral judgement on an action. You believe we should be allowed to do it, he doesn't, that's it.

[zookeeper]

It's the general line of thinking "I think this is wrong so you shouldn't be allowed to do it" that gets my goat about it.  Why on Earth should I care what the proverbial you or your God care about when it comes to my actions and beliefs?  Obviously there will be consequences, but it's emphatically neither a right nor a privilege for anyone to determine what I think is right for me.

What's the point of that question? Everyone thinks there are things others shouldn't be allowed to do, yourself included. Just answer your own question and there you have it.

[General Battuta]

Yeah, the statement 'You can do anything you please, as long as it doesn't hurt anyone else' is pretty universally agreeable...up until you try to pin down the stuff after the comma.

[Scotty]

It's the general line of thinking "I think this is wrong so you shouldn't be allowed to do it" that gets my goat about it.  Why on Earth should I care what the proverbial you or your God care about when it comes to my actions and beliefs?  Obviously there will be consequences, but it's emphatically neither a right nor a privilege for anyone to determine what I think is right for me.

What's the point of that question? Everyone thinks there are things others shouldn't be allowed to do, yourself included. Just answer your own question and there you have it.

There are indeed things that others shouldn't be allowed to do.  Almost universally (you could probably dig hard enough to find one or two contrary), those things are detrimental to societal safety and well-being beyond the whims of the person doing it.  Murder is obvious, as are rape, physical intimidation (assault and/or battery), blackmail, extortion, fraud, and a while host of other things.  Hell, driving while intoxicated and smoking in a confined public space fit the bill.

It's when things go beyond that to "I think this is immoral because X", where X is an easy majority of religious reasons that it goes too far.  Such is the case here.  Quite frankly, even if PP was flat out being paid for this it would not raise a blip on my radar unless that particular fact influenced PP staff to give fraudulent council on whether a prospective mother should get an abortion or not (which, in all fairness it probably would).

When people let personal disgust  rather than any sort of informed judgement influence what other people should be allowed to do is where this one goes horribly wrong.

And this is all leaving aside issues of bodily autonomy!

[Phantom Hoover]

what i want to know is how the palestinians are behind this

[zookeeper]

There are indeed things that others shouldn't be allowed to do.  Almost universally (you could probably dig hard enough to find one or two contrary), those things are detrimental to societal safety and well-being beyond the whims of the person doing it.  Murder is obvious, as are rape, physical intimidation (assault and/or battery), blackmail, extortion, fraud, and a while host of other things.  Hell, driving while intoxicated and smoking in a confined public space fit the bill.

It's when things go beyond that to "I think this is immoral because X", where X is an easy majority of religious reasons that it goes too far.

Well, no one thinks murder, rape, assault or extortion are wrong primarily because of their detrimental impacts to societal safety. They're deemed wrong (primarily) because of how they directly hurt/harm a person, and even you'd consider them (or most of them anyway) to be wrong because of that even if they magically had no societal effects.

A pro-lifer considers a fetus to be a person, in which case, obviously they would equate murder and abortion and would want both to be disallowed. When the disagreement clearly is about the premise, it'd be a good idea not to portray it as being about something else.