Essay talk:Where do you fall in the abortion debate?

36 Weeks

Is PoorEd reading PalMD wrong? Surely PoorEd doesn't actually mean that it's OK to abort up to 36 weeks (9 months). Genghis ^Marauding 12:42, 10 March 2008 (EDT)

Yes, and his math skills are seriously called into question. I was thinking more in terms of 12 weeeks. Thanks, Ghenghis. PoorEd 13:35, 10 March 2008 (EDT)

Are you going to change it then? Genghis ^Marauding 14:01, 10 March 2008 (EDT)

O.K., Dick, you can change yours now if necessary... 14:22, 10 March 2008 (EDT)

Elassint

I was just wondering (if you don't mind) - in light of your position on abortion, what is your stance on the morning-after pill? Uchiha^KATON! 21:59, 15 May 2008 (EDT)

Freakonomics

Anyone else here read the book Freakonomics? The authors make a fairly (Though not totally) compelling case that legalizing abortion has reduced the crime rate. There was some controversy about this of course, and a few debates, and the authors now seem convinced that yes, there is a causal link, but not as strong as the one they put forward in their book. In the book I think they said about 50% of the crime drop of the 90's was attributable to abortion being legalized in the 70's. If it were true, would it affect anyone's opinions. In any case it's a very callous, utilitarian argument, in fact they make it very clear they aren't arguing for or against abortion, merely interpreting statistics.MertonVsHislop

There are easier ways to find information about it, for example Wikipedia's The Impact of Legalized Abortion on Crime.

However, if we take it in a broad sense, social problems actually get worse. After legalizing abortion, there has been a huge increases in teen pregnancy, homelessness, hunger, welfare, divorce, poverty, child abuse, spousal abuse, deadbeat dads, gangs, illegal drugs, sexually transmitted diseases, high school drop outs, and the list goes on and on. Indeed, this is fact, but it needs great analyze to say it's all because of legalized abortion. But taxpayer is subsidizing the abortion industry anyway.

Let's take the hypothesis that legalized killing of human beings in their early stage of development (=abortion) helps us to reduce crime rate. Would that still justify it? If slaughter of innocent and defenseless people is an acceptable way to solve problems, well, why kill the unborn? They are the one category of human beings who had nothing to do with creating these problems and whose death would not solve them. You should probably notice that no one ever volunteers to give their own life to solve social problems, they only insist that others do so.

It is actually strange that pro-choice people accuse pro-life people because they support death penalty and still call themselves "pro-life". I don't support death penalty, but I find it strange that pro-choicers don't support it while they see killing unborn people (=abortion) as an acceptable way to reduce crime rate.

By the way, if legalized abortion helps to solve our problems, it's because some people are not wanted by their parents. But "unwanted" does not describe the child itself but an attitude of adults. What strategy sounds more rational; to deal with the attitude of the adults or kill the objects of this attitude?

--Earthland 19:36, 13 October 2009 (UTC)

That's an interesting way of looking at it, and obviously there's the argument that correlation doesn't prove causation. But the authors went out of their way to a) Try and demonstrate causation, which they did reasonably and b) mention the moral implications you did. Equally, I've never heard, and probably never will hear, this being used as an argument for abortion, largely because pro-choicers always try and emphasize that a zygote/fetus does not constitute life. Bringing up their potential criminal records won't help them argue this. The nature of the argument would certainly attract derision (The authors were unfairly labelled racists, despite not promoting abortion, and working only with actual statistics not conjecture or pseudoscience. [It's not racist if it can be proved empirically, and if you accept their statistics and methodology (Which not everyone has) then the conclusion is neither racist nor escapable.).

To your actual point (Sorry I skipped it, but I felt the need to defend the book) I would say you're begging the point by reffering to fetuses as people. I can accept that at some point (20 weeks is the number I hear getting thrown around a lot) they do become people, they can think, feel and, perhaps most importantly, remember at around that time. But before that, I don't think theyre people any more than skin cells or hair is. They're part of the mother. And the fact that they are 'potential' life seems irrelevant because so are sperm, fertilized eggs that don't attach to the uterine wall, and anything with a nucleus as they can be used (Hypothetically) for cloning. I think that last one is correct anyway, there's a few different cloning methods but I think they all involve the extraction of a nucleus from any cells.

Anyway, I've typed a lot, without saying much, and I've no doubt it was unconvincing. I see what I've written and I see where you're coming from and I await a fierce rebuttal. Also, I sort of assumed you were pro-life based on your comment. If not...sorry? Oh, and does the government (We talking USA here) really fund abortions? I know only some Canadian Provinces do, and I heard that Obama said clinics that perform abortions can get funding, but has that taken affect yet? Are the abortions subsidized? Fully-Covered? Also, I think one or two of the items on your list are actually down from the 70's, but you're point is still made.MertonVsHislop 23:47, 22 October 2009 (UTC)

82.69.171.94

Newborn babies aren't people. Have you seen a newborn baby? Does that look or act like a being with appreciably the same inner world that you enjoy, the same ability to have hopes and dreams? No. It has little more in common with you than a freshly dead corpse. Nature is not obliged to provide us with convenient bright lines to cut along. We have been very lucky on species, in the sense that our distant ancestors probably murdered all the other species in Homo before recorded history and so we don't have the ethical burden of deciding what the hell to do about them now. But when it comes to our own kind, babies occupy a grey area. Somewhere between the first gasp of breath and the first Wiki posting, something eerily familiar develops, a mirror image of ourselves that demands recognition as a person. Theory of mind develops. Empathy comes to the fore. We should be thankful we can find an excuse not to have to draw the line, to date personhood precisely but whenever it is, it's after birth.

So, personhood of the child is not enough to help us here. If that were all we worried about, we could as well "abort" babies after they're born, and indeed several works of SF deal with aborting children well past the stage where they're talking about it among themselves. So it has to come down to the only person left in the picture, the mother/ host. At a certain point it will be medically more dangerous to abort than to go through with the pregnancy, and we should be cautious about allowing people who may not be altogether themselves to take that risk based on their imaginary version of future events. Other than that, it has to be the choice of the person taking the risk, and her alone.

The reason we can't abort babies once they're born is that is that they're not just property of the mother, or of both parents. They're property of the entire society and so of the state on behalf of society. This is nothing special about babies. The state also asserts an interest in puppies and kittens, devices which emit large quantities of electromagnetic radiation, certain weapons, fissile materials, and tiny flakes of iron oxide representing moving images of famous people among other things.

BTW if you want a really nasty moral dilemma, the new Greg Egan book mostly got attention because it's about a universe with different physics but unless you're a physicist the far more important difference is that the characters are all members of a species which reproduces by fission of the "female". No "woman" in this world can survive to see her children grow up, the decision to have children isn't just figuratively about giving up other aspects of one's life, it's quite literally a mortal sacrifice. 82.69.171.94 (talk) 11:05, 9 January 2012 (UTC)