Should Abortion be made illegal?

I think up until a certain point (viability is the point that I tend to go with, although it's not 100% when that is) that is is just cells/tissue, rather than an innocent human being.

Well I would disagree that the unborn are not innocent human beings for a number of reasons.

1) The unborn are growing so they must be alive. If they were not alive, then you would not need to abort them.
2) The unborn are human because they have human DNA and have human parents.
3) Unlike sperm or cancer cells, the unborn are complete organisms capable of growing into an adult unless they are killed by someone or something before that time.
4) Do these foetuses deserve to be killed? If not, then they are therefore innocent of the punishment being handed to them.

This demonstrates that the unborn are innocent human beings and thus that abortion kills them, thus that abortion is morally wrong. Does this help you?

Point one is very flawed. Tumours grow, doesn't mean they are alive. You can grow carbon nanotubes, doesn't make them alive.

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1) It is generally wrong to directly kill innocent human beings
2) The unborn are innocent human beings
3) Abortion directly kills the unborn
4) Therefore it is wrong to abort the unborn.

Would you not agree with this argument and why?

I suppose the problem with this debate, now, is that people in this thread seem to adhere to different moral philosophies.

Not that you were directing the question to me, but I reject Premise 1. It's not generally wrong to directly kill innocent human beings. Whether a being is human or not, first of all, is irrelevant, or indeed whether a being is innocent. Everything depends on the circumstances and the consequences of the act, and whether the being is a person - that is, a being which can suffer pain and gain pleasure.

In this situation, I submit that a calculation needs to take place - weighing up the preference of the mother who wants to abort the foetus against the foetus's preference. The foetus, however, does not have a preference: it cannot suffer or gain pleasure, which are prerequisites for having any preferences at all. The foetus does not care whether it lives or dies, but the mother does not want to continue with the pregnancy. Therefore, the mother's preferences, axiomatically, outweigh the non-existent preferences of the foetus.

I am actually quite shocked and disgusted that anyone actually thinks this is still up for debate. The reasons for it being legal are there, and the only people who argue to repeal the act clearly just haven't quite grasped them.

First and foremost, Law and Morality are extremely different things;







Morality has no place in a law. Subjective moral viewpoints are not compatible with modern legislative.



Secondly, we live in a biopolitical society. What this means is that our culture and government, at it's core, is focused primarily around the biological well being of it's populace. Reasons for that such as productivity aside, making abortions illegal would be counter intuitive to that focus. Abortions are sometimes necessary due to the health of both the mother and the child. I despise anecdotes, but in the example of an impending miscarriage in which the mother is risking serious mental or physical damage, why on earth should her solution be illegal?

The only justification for making abortions illegal from a cultural biopolitical perspective would have to involve infrastructure changes in which;


- Every Child Was Adopted,
- Every family was required to be a loving home,
- Every woman was reduced to a subservient position.


What anti abortion people are actively arguing for then, translates to;



- Strict Government rules on how to live
- Authoritarian enforcement on moral choices
- Scrapping of feminist advancement



Finally, I just wanted to say that what we're discussing here isn't whether 'such and such' should have had an abortion or not. We're discussing whether there should be a blanket ban on all abortions.


I'd like anyone, particularly the women posters but the men can try too, to imagine for a moment that this was all flipped around.

YOU NOW HAVE TO HAVE AN ABORTION by Law. We're telling you 'You absolutely, regardless of circumstance, have to agree with our morals'. How do you feel about that? Wouldn't you rather that, if you didn't agree, yo could choose not to have an abortion? Well too bad, because you're arguing against that and you got your way. Enjoy.


There's just no getting around the fact that if you're arguing for abortions to be illegal, you're arguing that some people shouldn't be given a choice.


Hopefully, we can finally put this ignorant and disgusting view to rest now. /Thread.

The question we continue to raise is if the thing being aborted is just tissue, and it's not a human being, then abortion isn't a big deal; it's just like a tonsillectomy. But if the thing being aborted is a human being with the same basic rights you and I possess, then abortion cannot be tolerated because we don't tolerate the legal killing of innocent human beings.

If abortion is murder, which I believe it is, then not only should it not be tolerated, but what we as a human society have allowed to occur in the last 40 years is a larger death count than pretty much every genocide in history combined... a truly revolting ugly picture of affairs, would you not agree?

By saying that "It's not generally wrong to directly kill innocent human beings", you are saying that the majority of cases where humans kill other humans are morally acceptable. This, I can only presume means that you find murder to on the whole be morally acceptable...

If you do think this, then the question I put to you is do you think there is anything right or wrong at all?

Just as it is illegal to kill a 2-year old because we do not want to take care of them, equally it should be illegal to kill a younger child/ an unborn child for that same reason if that child is a human being like you or I.

The reason i object is that i find this immoral to abort a fetus. I see it the same as killing a person. That fetus had all right to be born and see the world as you and me are seeing it today

Refer please to my first point about personal morals being separate to legal systems. Thank you.

Forgive me, but I find your first point to be total nonsense, personally. Murder is morally wrong. I don't think either of us would deny this although others on this page seem to. Murder is illegal because it is morally wrong to end the life of an innocent human being. On the contrary to your statement, moral statements are absolutely enshrined in the legal systems of countries and districts. Now, things which are made legal can be morally wrong since the laws themselves aren't arbiters of moral truth, even if people think they are changing laws for morally good reasons. Stealing is morally bad, so we outlaw stealing. Rape is morally abhorrent, so we outlaw rape. Child pornography is morally sickening so we outlaw child pornography. Morals are inherently tied to legal systems, so I don't think you are correct for these reasons.

No - and I should have pointed this out earlier - your use of the word 'generally' implies that there are some cases in which it is morally permissible to directly kill innocent human beings. If this is the case, then those in favour of abortion can argue that, in terms of this issue, it is not wrong to kill innocent human beings as it generally is.

I rejected your premise, primarily, because of your use of the word human beings. However, in addition to this, in crude terms (though it can become more complicated), I judge whether an action is right or wrong based on the number of persons whose interests are being met and, I would agree that, in most cases in the real world in which innocent persons have been killed, the act was wrong.



Absolutely. In the rest of my previous post, I, at the very least, implied that abortion is morally right, for instance.




Legality doesn't always equal morality. I would say that it is immoral to kill a 2-year old, because the 2-year old is self-conscious and has an interest in staying alive. As I've already stated earlier on in this thread, there are some cases, for example on a stranded island, where the killing of a newborn baby would be justified if the parents preferred it, as there would be no one to adopt the baby, which would bring pleasure to the hypothetical adoptive parents. If, however, a newborn baby is not desired by the parents, but someone else is willing to adopt the baby, then not only does adoption get rid of the displeasure on the part of the parents, but it increases the overall pleasure too because the adoptive parent(s) will be happy to adopt the child.

Abortion, however, involves a 9-month period of emotional, mental and physical distress for a woman. It's easy to see why a woman would take great displeasure in being forced to hold a foetus in the womb for 9 months for adoptive parents. Thus, I reject the adoption argument in the case of abortion, and when the foetus is the product of a rape or when it threatens the life of the mother, the argument in favour of abortion is even more clear-cut. I also once again stress that the foetus has no preference as to whether it lives or dies.

If you object to the "generally", then I suppose I could agree with you, if you mean that it is "always wrong" to directly kill innocent people. I suppose I was thinking about just war situations in which innocent people are killed, with the intention of trying to limit the death count but I suppose you are correct that actually directly killing innocent human beings is always wrong, so fair enough. Even in this case, this would still demonstrate that abortion is always wrong.

I sincerely disagree with the rest of your post however. Do you know that the unborn doesn't have an interest in staying alive? If you do not, then there is no justification for deliberately ending its life.

To be frank, the so-called "emotional, mental and physical distress for a woman" is something that a woman should know of before said woman engages in sexual intercourse. Even if this sexual intercourse is forced on her (e.g. rape), there is still no justification for abortion since why should the child in the womb be punished for the wrongdoings of the father? The rights of the mother end when the new life begins.

The reason i object is that i find this immoral to abort a fetus. I see it the same as killing a person. That fetus had all right to be born and see the world as you and me are seeing it today

Murder is illegal because it isn't beneficial for society for it to be legal. There's no moral reasoning used in the justification for the laws around it. The closest we as a society come to moral involvement with law is human rights, which are actually considered fairly null and void by most legal scholars because it's very easy to make someone into a 'nonperson'; such as with a foetus. These are the problems that come from considering my first point nonsense. This is your issue. You see Law as something moral, rather than something societal. Worse, you see it as being by necessity an extension of your morals rather than as any collective morals.


There's really no room for growth here. I'm just going to keep explaining your misconstrual to you and you're just going to keep saying it again. I mean no offence to your views or to you as a person, but it's hard when you know responding isn't going to have any potential for someone to acknowledge anything you're saying.

The definition of a tumour: A swelling of a part of the body, generally without inflammation, caused by an abnormal growth of tissue.

Tissues are composed of cells, and cells are alive, which therefore means tumours are alive. Tumours however are not complete organisms, rather they are a malignant affliction on healthy organisms, so that to effectively compare a tumour to a foetus is nonsensical in my opinion.

Knowledge of carbon nanotubes are outside my understanding at this current point so I cannot comment as to whether or not they are alive.

Do you deny that the unborn are alive? If you do not, my argument still stands.

Yes, I can see where you are coming from, but you also have to think of a scenario of a 'fetus' being bought into the world not seeing the world that you an I see today, but they see a world of voilence, hate and abuse, is it fair to bring them into that ?

This is one of those arguments that will go on for a long time.

I sit on the fence in this debate.

I think killing all people with genetic diseases that can't currently be cured could be conceived as "beneficial for society", from a sadistic pragmatic, materialist viewpoint. This would free up hospitals for people who have diseases that can be cured and could prevent these diseases from passing onto future generations. Murdering these people could be conceived as "beneficial for society", even though it is morally wrong to do so.

This fundamentally, for me anyway, completely demonstrates why morality has a very big influence on legal systems

and that the law acts as an incentive to stop you doing certain things, which means that your initial point was incorrect. I'm not saying that the law is the complete codified moral truth for one second, but I am saying that it should be.