Originally Posted by
tehdang
More dehumanization from the pro-abort crowd.
A fetus isn't a person. Pretty much every single law code on the planet agrees with this. Even if they were, it wouldn't affect abortion rights at all, because a hypothetical right to life for a fetus could never infringe on the right to bodily autonomy of the pregnant person.
Fetal personhood is a fight pro-lifers like because they get to feign a moral high ground, but it's a dishonest straw man that seeks to ignore the inherent question being asked, and which fundamentally dismisses the humanity of women, as a class. Meaning all this "you're dehumanizing fetuses!" garbage is nothing but projection.
Yes, you started life prior to the transition through a birth canal or incision. No, that wasn't a quasi-religious ceremony where you suddenly became a person from being a non-person before.
"Started life" is an irrelevant and biologically false statement. The donor parents were alive, their gametes were alive, the fertilized ovum was alive, the zygote it became was alive. At no point in that process was any of the component elements "not alive". No life "began", life was continuing to self-replicate. If you meant "a life", then you're again talking about a religious argument, and that's just not an argument, and you can stuff your theocratic views back where they came from.
Edit: Just for the sake of clarity, I couldn't care less what anyone's religious views are, generally, but there's a difference between "my religion says I shouldn't do a thing", and "my religion says you shouldn't do a thing". If you're arguing the latter, you can shove off, because you're dismissing other people's spiritual views and trying to enforce your views as a societal standard.
I'm a little more compassionate than you about unconscious people.
That's an intentional misrepresentation of Fugus' point. The concept of "consciousness" as a descriptor of a mind and the state of "consciousness" in terms of being awake or not are not the same thing.
Every premature birth is not a magical personhood ritual. They were people before, they were people after, and they're people if they're still undelivered after the due date.
This is just objectively false. "Personhood" is a legal concept. And the law is clear; here's the USA's; https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/1/8
In determining the meaning of any Act of Congress, or of any ruling, regulation, or interpretation of the various administrative bureaus and agencies of the United States, the words “person”, “human being”, “child”, and “individual”, shall include every infant member of the species homo sapiens who is born alive at any stage of development.
So you're technically right in that there's no magical ritual, which literally nobody claimed. But you're wrong in that there's a clear and objectively-determinable legal definition that's met by virtue of an infant being born alive.
Gestation is a period of growth before delivery. If the baby is akin to being brain-dead in the womb, then I'd argue you're trying to conflate removal of the dead body after a fetal death with aborting a live person with a developing brain. You may be aware of the advances in what science says about the pain response and babies recognizing voices prior to delivery. Pretty cool stuff, if you aren't intent on dehumanization as a means of justifying abortion.
Remains 100% irrelevant to the concept of abortion rights, however, because no rights of the infant to health or security can infringe on the pregnant person's right to self-ownership/bodily autonomy. This is true in every other case other than pregnancy, so why would pregnancy be an exception to that standard rule?
A living, developing child in the womb is not un-human prior to the final step of acquiring a consciousness of itself and the outside world. But I already covered this, and this is boilerplate abortion philosophical disagreement. At least from the section of pro-abortion activists that deny any moral dilemma regarding the developing baby, because I don't want to forget pro-abortion activists that's value the moral claims for the life of the baby, but decide that mothers' do outweigh it at all or most points.
Bodily autonomy does trump right to life under any other circumstances. That's why you can't have your organs or tissues/fluids forcibly harvested against your will to save someone else's life with a needed transplant. If you understand why that would be wrong, you understand why opposing abortion rights is equally wrong.
Pro-choice activists have been firebombing crisis pregnancy centers knowing that they counsel in favor of keeping the baby. Your decision to try to shed them from your side is indicative of your need to never address anything unfortunate from your ideological side. Ignorance injures the ability to provide for children after birth, and undercuts your attempts to claim protection and provision for young babies. So maybe decry any fellow pro-choice activists that do harm to crisis pregnancy centers, because they certainly believe that their evil comes from encouraging and supporting a mother's decision to carry and birth the baby. Remember, people do watch the indifference from the pro-choice side when activists decide a center is doing evil in their counseling and seek to end it with arson and property destruction.
As opposed to pro-lifers, who've historically engaged in straight up murder and bombings intended to kill people, rather than simply property damage. The most recent killing was a mass shooting in 2015. In terms of arson, no less than 6 attacks over the last couple years. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-a...#United_States
And those "crisis pregnancy centers" are well-known for engaging in malicious and abusive conduct, to push ideological views rather than to serve patients' needs. Which you're going to ignore.