Talk:Abortion

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First quote

RationalWiki must have quite an obsession for Trump, since it needed to begin the page on abortion with a twitter about Donald Trump written by some (practically unknown) ceejayoz...

"Trump won't drop out. Hey, Republicans, how does it feel to be forced to carry something to term?" [ceejayoz]

I replaced it with a - much more reasonable - quote from Chomsky:

"You're not going to get the answers from holy texts. You're not going to the answers from biologists. These are matters of human concern. There are conflicting values and taken in isolation each of these values is quite legitimate. Choice is legitimate, preserving life is legitimate." [Noam Chomsky]

McLaghing (talk) 22:01, 13 December 2017 (UTC)

Very late response but that quote just isn't doing it for me. The anti-abortion movement is in a darker side of gray than the pro-abortion movement and we're not going to invoke some false equivalence that the anti-abortion holds equal moral ground to the pro-abortion. I also checked the source of the quote which leads to a documentary that, of course, aims to product graphic scenes of consequences from both sides and is actually about promoting the "both sides" part which IMO, ends up obfuscating the actual problem. And I mean, the very real problem of women being unable to provide for future children, anti-abortion activists criminalizing women with miscarriages or women that attempt abortions, the anti-abortion pushing outright pseudoscience to support their views, the anti-abortion movement telling doctors to tell women outright lies about fetal pain, mental health issues and breast cancer bunk; the anti-abortion movement deceiving and scamming women from seeking appropriate care via crisis pregnancy center; the anti-abortion movement closing all clinics for hundreds of miles away; and the movement's consequences disproportionately affecting low-income women and so on. This ends up affecting children as the ultimate consequence as they grow up in suboptimal conditions and can possibly face understandable resentment from their mothers (which they don't deserve). A dead fetus from an extremely rare third trimester abortion is not the equivalent nor is the occasional violence and aggressive heckling by pro-abortion protestors. --It's-a me, LeftyGreenMario! 03:39, 21 February 2019 (UTC)

Re-write of Section 4.1 Religious views : Abrahamic religions

This fairly short section irks me;

¶ 1 says "abortifacients … likely … existed in ancient Israel. Yet neither the Torah, nor the Bible … mentions the practice."

¶ 3 describes the book of Numbers (Torah and Bible) as describing the use of an abortifacient. (A magically parentage-detecting one.)

Further, there's no mention of the times Jehovah's instructions during war included killing all of the enemy's children and/or all pregnant women and/or all women who have lain with a man recently but are not yet obviously pregnant. (These killings were to prevent the male children and fetuses from growing up to take revenge upon the Jews, so they can be considered abortions with a 0% survival rate of the pregnant or possibly-pregnant women.)

(I didn't want to re-write this section myself, as I expect someone will revert all edits just to keep the page from changing.) — Moray (talk) 02:10, 15 September 2018 (UTC)

Paraphrase of Quine's essay "Future" from Quiddities.

Religious temperament produces a tendency to withhold truth and falsity from predictions of contingent events. However, if we accept (as we ought to) the Minkowskian view, which incorporates time as a fourth dimension—where the future is determined by the past—welcome ethical consequences can follow. For instance, consider the dual problems of climate change and women who cannot afford to support a potential baby: conservation of the environment is called for by the interests of people as yet unborn, and abortions are called for by, first and foremost, women. On the one hand, we are respecting the interests of those people not yet born, and on the other hand we are denying them the right to be born—a fundamental tension has risen. Strikingly, the four-dimensional view dissolves this tension. By its lights, people and other things of both past and future are as real as those today, where are is interpreted tenselessly as in 'Two and two are four'. People who will be born are real people, tenselessly speaking, and their interests are to be respected now and always.

❦

People who, due to abortion, will not be born, are a figment; there are no such people, nowhere do they exist in the space-time continuum, and so nobody's right to life has been infringed.

❦

The four-dimensional view respects all actualities: past, present, future; but has no time for mere possibilities that are never to be actualised. As Quine glossed it:

“”The rights of an unactualized possible are contingent upon its actualisation.

Leucippus^{Salva veritate} 02:33, 5 September 2021 (UTC)

Wikipedia

Rational Wiki's article on abortion sounds much more neutral than Wikipedia's, which is quite biased toward pro-choice. The irony! - Dropix (talk) 19:51, 15 October 2022 (UTC)