ALL HAIL PRESIDENT TRUMP

Boem, there is no particular law against killing a fish, or a chicken, or a cow, or putting a dog down. Obviously life is not the standard.

The real question, to me, is when is the fetus its own human being? By third trimester, almost certainly: prematurely born infants have survived such conditions. I'm definitely against the weird fringe of pro-choicers who would support third-trimester abortions. And, just to err on the side of not murdering, I'm against second-trimester abortions to boot, because I don't see why a reasonably responsible pregnant woman couldn't terminate an unwanted pregnancy by about the 8-10 week mark.

But I think it's important to give women who don't want to get pregnant a backup plan. Contraception doesn't have a 100% success rate, and it will take on average 3 weeks for a reasonably sensible woman to realize she's pregnant. I'm not super offended by Georgia's recent "Heartbeat Law," as 6 weeks is usually doable, but it does seem to me to be unnecessarily harsh.

I was once asked, "Pro choice?" I replied, "if humanity was more united and we raised our children together... We wouldn’t be having this conversation."

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ScrotieMcB wrote:

Boem, there is no particular law against killing a fish, or a chicken, or a cow, or putting a dog down. Obviously life is not the standard.

The real question, to me, is when is the fetus its own human being? By third trimester, almost certainly: prematurely born infants have survived such conditions. I'm definitely against the weird fringe of pro-choicers who would support third-trimester abortions. And, just to err on the side of not murdering, I'm against second-trimester abortions to boot, because I don't see why a reasonably responsible pregnant woman couldn't terminate an unwanted pregnancy by about the 8-10 week mark.

But I think it's important to give women who don't want to get pregnant a backup plan. Contraception doesn't have a 100% success rate, and it will take on average 3 weeks for a reasonably sensible woman to realize she's pregnant. I'm not super offended by Georgia's recent "Heartbeat Law," as 6 weeks is usually doable, but it does seem to me to be unnecessarily harsh.

For the animal part, i never said i think current society has a good standard of appreciating life.

We can do the reverse thinking and say "maybe we treat animals the way we do because our standard for life isn't what it's suppose to be".
I think it's perfectly reasonable to make a claim that your own life is more important then another life when death is the natural outcome of not making that decision, so killing an animal for food is a claim i could defend if there is appreciation for taking that life away to sustain yourself.

As for the when is it a human being, sience is pretty much out on that question, new dna get's formed on conception which dictates how that new person is going to look, what gender it is going to have, the color of it's eyes etc etc.

I'm having this scenery in my head where a women is not crying because she fell and her 2 week old fetus died because of the impact. It just doesn't add up for me sorry.
I guess calling it a fetus makes it acceptable somehow when science pretty much concluded already when new individual life is established.
I mean we have in vitro fertilisation, we know exactly how and when a baby is "viable".

As for the women having a choice, i don't have anything against that i just think the choice to kill a new unique person isn't suppose to be one of them if we want to claim we are living in a society that appreciates life.

How about the choice to not let the man cum inside? Seems a 100% safe route to me. I don't get the whole let's use fringe cases to justify this practice, when people can make simple individual choices to not get pregnant.

I usually see people defend this with "what if the mother is in danger","what if its a rape","what if the contraception failed".

And only the rape one seems to make sense to me, since that's not a personal choice.

Peace,

-Boem-

edit : cheers though, i just can't get behind it since i think it has profound resonance in further moral reasoning and actions if the fundamentals aren't solid or in this case "anti-life". Maybe i should use human life because i do believe we have a moral responsability to our own species first.

Boem, saying that a fertilized egg is an independent human life from conception is like saying your finger is an independent human life. Does your finger have a developed brain to think its own independent thoughts with? No. Can it survive independently of you? No. And although I find it distasteful, I respect a person's right to chop off their own finger, should they choose to. I adamantly reject that an embryo is an independent human life with its own "ghost" from conception.

Could the developing life achieve this distinction months before birth? Quite possibly. For all I know it's at the 6 week mark — I'm not exactly a medical expert. But a few dozen cells the size of a pea? Gimme a break.

"How about the choice to not let the man cum inside?" you ask. Well, that's why abortions involve long and uncomfortable medical visits, my friend, as they very well should. But I think it's a tad harsh to dedicate someone to decades of parenting an unwanted child, or the tediousness of adoption, just for a single night of foolish passion, when we have the means to spare them. I get the idea of personal responsibility, but just because we can avoid cavities by regularly brushing our teeth doesn't mean I want to abolish the practice of dentistry.

I should, however, explain the limits of my compassion here. There are two types of abortion scenarios:
1. As soon as the woman realizes she is pregnant — whether she desired it, meant to avoid it, or some confused middle in between — she unequivocally wants it terminated.
2. When the woman realizes she is pregnant, she continues to waffle between wanting the pregnancy, not wanting it, or some mixture of the two, and holds abortion as a possibility to keep her options open.

I have near zero compassion for the Type 2s. Maybe a day's worth of patience, tops. Because to not decide is to signal that one is open to being swayed one way or another, and to signal that is to indicate that one is open to bribes to reach one conclusion or the other. To hold a fetus hostage as a bargaining chip for negotiating a better position is morally abhorrent to me. I'd much rather the agreement signed (or rejected), the negotiations concluded, and the terms for breach of contract enforced; the legal systems of the West already have robust systems for dealing with men who renege. (To be more honest, that's my real reason for opposition to second-term abortions.)

But I do feel a lot of compassion for the Type 1s. You mention people who have been raped, and they are certainly the easiest of the Type 1s to feel compassion for. But I think there are a lot of social complications inherent in separating them too distinctly from the other type 1s. Imagine, if you will, a young lady who does consent, but only after continuous — but flattering — pressure from the man, and after having one alcoholic beverage — enough to give the slight buzz of liquid courage, but not enough to make her black-out or even sloppy drunk. Under the "rape-only" abortion system, she has tremendous incentive to file a rape charge, by mischaracterizing his advances as unwanted, by exaggerating the extent of her alcohol consumption, or both. She's in a position where she can ruin a decent man's life to get what she wants, or leave him unmolested and get screwed (pun intended).

And given that BOTH parties to the fornication probably regret the pregnancy, why not just let them abort it, providing they don't dilly-dally about it? Maybe I'm off on this, but it seems like you're forgetting that men can want abortions too. (I sure as fuck have.)

I firmly believe that we have enough problems with incentivizing false rape charges — and, as inevitable blowback, difficulty believing innocent rape victims — inherent in our system already. I feel the solution is to remove incentives for false rape claims, and that means equalizing conditions among ALL Type 1s. I'd support programs like interest-free government loans to cover the costs of legal, first-trimester abortions, and/or government-enforced 50% liability on the man for covering those costs — 100% in the event of a rape conviction, even though that's admittedly not equalizing. And at the very least, speedy abortions should be legal for all Type 1s.

Hopefully we could shift to a less "battle of the sexes" culture where these kinds of rape-related problems of deceit and distrust aren't nearly as prominent as they are now.

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ScrotieMcB wrote:

Boem, saying that a fertilized egg is an independent human life from conception is like saying your finger is an independent human life. Does your finger have a developed brain to think its own independent thoughts with? No. Can it survive independently of you? No. And although I find it distasteful, I respect a person's right to chop off their own finger, should they choose to. I adamantly reject that an embryo is an independent human life with its own "ghost" from conception.

Could the developing life achieve this distinction months before birth? Quite possibly. For all I know it's at the 6 week mark — I'm not exactly a medical expert. But a few dozen cells the size of a pea? Gimme a break.

What ghost? I'm talking about the dna that formulate your entire being. That is what makes you you, not some "primal essence" or some "soul".

The dna that makes you you was present from conception and that's what science already established.
That's why they fertilize an egg and then implant it in case of in vitro fertilization and why they say "congratulations, your pregnant, your going to have a baby".

They know exactly when they succeeded and what they succeeded in.

I'm not making some fantastical or biblical soul argument here, i'm just following what science established.

The comparison with the finger also seems a rather cheap shot for two reasons.

1) a finger isn't a part in human development that replicates and self orients the entire dna expression within its code. An embryo on the other hand, is exactly that, a phase of every human where it's cells start to divide based on it's dna code expression.

2) given that we can in this day and age revert any part of a human back to stam cells it wouldn't surprise me in the least if they could revert a part of a finger back to stam cells to then let it re-orient it to another part of the dna expression.(not done on humans as far as i know, but already done on animals, research clean meat if your interested)

Does the finger have the entire blue-print of a ScrotieMcB inside it? Yes it does. Does it inherently have the capability to realize that blue-print? Nope.

Tagging the term independent on "an independent human life" as if a child of the age of two is somehow indepent also feels like a cheap trick. Doesn't seem to detract a two year old from it's claim of being human so no clue why it's relevant for an embryo.

I found your choice of words fascinating in the last part and i can understand the concerns projected. But i also feel the reasoning based on fear which always puts me on edge.
Specifically when it's about something as fundamental as "human life is sacred yes/no".

Peace,

-Boem-

Exhibit A: WaPo says fact-checkers have identified 10,000 Trump lies
Exhibit B: AOC says world will end in 12 years unless climate change addressed
Exhibit C:

^Climate change has been good fun for years.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EmDeqrTemBg

Progressives, repeating what others have been using for roughly 40 years and counting.

Peace,

-Boem-

Pro "choice" people justify the termination of human infants in the womb by dehumanizing them, characterizing them as "blobs of tissue." Yet every viable human fetus is genetically a member of the human species. To destroy them while they are helpless to survive on their own is akin to pulling the plug on a patient in a coma whose prognosis is that they WILL recover within nine months. Both can be expected to become functional members of the population, if only no one decides that their recovery/gestation is too much of an inconvenience to those responsible for them.

Moreover, a human fetus incorporates a unique combination of genetic traits from both parents, and those traits include a personality. The field of behavioral epigenetics reveals that:

"

In large part, personality is genetically inherited; it can be observed at the genetic level and it can occur for consecutive generations.

https://www.consciouslifestylemag.com/is-personality-genetic-new-research/


This means that that "blob of cells" is already a "person" in the sense that it has a genetic destiny to develop a specific, unique personality. Further experience, even in utero, will of course modify and influence that personality. But to kill that viable, genetically human individual, possessed of a nascent personality, is no more moral than if that child had already been born. ='[.]'=

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Boem wrote:

What ghost? I'm talking about the dna that formulate your entire being. That is what makes you you, not some "primal essence" or some "soul".

I believe something like a soul is what makes people people. Certainly not the presence of DNA instructions.

I don't believe in a soul as a spiritual concept. I view it as a function of the brain, roughly equivalent to software. I don't believe in an immortal soul any more than I believe in software that can persist independently of hardware.

But I do believe in a mortal soul.

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Boem wrote:

"human life is sacred yes/no".

Is your finger human life? Yes. Is it sacred? I'd say so; try living without it. But it's not as sacred as consciousness, as the soul. When people talk about the sanctity of human life, that is what they're referring to. That's the standard for murder — to defile that sanctity by ending consciousness. The human brain also lacks the ability to realize the blueprint of an entire human being.

I feel like your emphasis on DNA and the potential for life is essentially a secularization of the "every sperm is sacred" argument common among evangellcons back in the day. And there is some degree of sanctity to such things, a quality that almost compels wonder. But not on the level of the soul. Some things are more sacred than others.

And from what I can tell, the soul isn't up and running until weeks after conception.