Should men get equal say in abortion?
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No. The woman's carrying the foetus so it's her main decision. Equality doesn't consider other factors.
Original post by Cognition!
I hope that some day, biological technology will have evolved far enough that babies can be conceived under laboratory conditions, so that women have the option of risk-free IVF with no pregnancy if they wish.
Then, if the woman were to change her mind for instance, it would be easy for the man to take custody into his own hands.
Then, if the woman were to change her mind for instance, it would be easy for the man to take custody into his own hands.
I hope this doesn't happen.
Original post by Ladymusiclover
I hope this doesn't happen.
Why?
Original post by Cognition!
Why?
It sounds too radical, science is fantastic but I don't want humans to end up becoming overly selfish when the biological way of having a child is generally fine as it is. It worries me how far science will go.
100% it should be a 50/50 decision.
That child is made up of equal amounts of the mother and father.
If men don't want the baby but the mother does then she has it, demands money from the father which is a legal requirement and if he is not in a position to do so is labelled a 'deadbeat'.
BUT if it is the other way around then men need to shut up and live with the fact that the mother can legally kill his child. This is even if the father was willing to bring up the child single-handed.
It's disgusting and another example of discrimination against men.
That child is made up of equal amounts of the mother and father.
If men don't want the baby but the mother does then she has it, demands money from the father which is a legal requirement and if he is not in a position to do so is labelled a 'deadbeat'.
BUT if it is the other way around then men need to shut up and live with the fact that the mother can legally kill his child. This is even if the father was willing to bring up the child single-handed.
It's disgusting and another example of discrimination against men.
Original post by Joel 96
This response was in reference to me asking h3rmit if he would support "the killing of a post-birth baby before a year old". A post-birth baby before a year-old looks like this:
Now, I realize that h3rmit is a big spokesperson on this forum for the pro-choice side, but doesn't anyone else from the pro-choice abhor and reject such a view? The devaluing of life subsequently leads to this - it always does.
This response was in reference to me asking h3rmit if he would support "the killing of a post-birth baby before a year old". A post-birth baby before a year-old looks like this:
Now, I realize that h3rmit is a big spokesperson on this forum for the pro-choice side, but doesn't anyone else from the pro-choice abhor and reject such a view? The devaluing of life subsequently leads to this - it always does.
Literally nobody from the pro-choice side wants to address this?
Is it just going to be ignored like last time, further showing how much of a "team-sport" politics and public policy is these days?
(edited 7 years ago)
Original post by Joel 96
Literally nobody from the pro-choice side wants to address this?
Is it just going to be ignored like last time, further showing how much of a "team-sport" politics and public policy is these days?
Is it just going to be ignored like last time, further showing how much of a "team-sport" politics and public policy is these days?
Sure. If you have an isolated universe, a one-year-old baby and an otherwise-insatiable desire to knock its skull through with a captive-bolt pistol... have at it. Nobody suffers, you gain, and the infant is simply returned to the nothingness from whence it came, having had a simple, hopefully happy life.
However, we don't live in isolated universes, and the routine 'aborting' of born babies is likely to produce great distress among many people in society, not least the doctors themselves who would be paid to carry out the procedure. Most humans simply can't escape their compassionate instincts towards babies in practice, and allowing systematic killing of babies could arguably cause great social damage as well as mental damage to doctors. Your choice to include an image demonstrates this - showing us how cute the baby is changes nothing ethically but nonetheless may convince many people that killing it is wrong. If you want to be objective, you should picture in your head a baby as a grotesque blob labelled Organism X, with less self-awareness than a magpie, and imagine how tragic it would be to painlessly kill it if it was demanding a huge share of your time and resources.
Safe abortion has been available for decades, and never have we approached the point of killing babies being seen as acceptable. Women are routinely punished for infanticide (I would argue more harshly than they deserve, but we can disagree about that). Improvements in medical technology will lower the age of viability and abortion law could tighten as easily as loosen with regard to age. I don't know if you're trying to make a slippery-slope argument or not, but I don't think one would get very far.
(edited 7 years ago)
Original post by Ladymusiclover
No. The woman's carrying the foetus so it's her main decision. Equality doesn't consider other factors.
In that case men should have no obligation, under the law, to finance a child's upbringing if the birth was without his consent.
Original post by Lavaridge
Sure. If you have an isolated universe, a one-year-old baby and an otherwise-insatiable desire to knock its skull through with a captive-bolt pistol... have at it. Nobody suffers, you gain, and the infant is simply returned to the nothingness from whence it came, having had a simple, hopefully happy life.
Original post by Lavaridge
Your choice to include an image demonstrates this - showing us how cute the baby is changes nothing ethically but nonetheless may convince many people that killing it is wrong. If you want to be objective, you should picture in your head a baby as a grotesque blob labelled Organism X, with less self-awareness than a magpie, and imagine how tragic it would be to painlessly kill it if it was demanding a huge share of your time and resources.
Your choice to include an image demonstrates this - showing us how cute the baby is changes nothing ethically but nonetheless may convince many people that killing it is wrong. If you want to be objective, you should picture in your head a baby as a grotesque blob labelled Organism X, with less self-awareness than a magpie, and imagine how tragic it would be to painlessly kill it if it was demanding a huge share of your time and resources.
How long is it until the legal embrace of pre-birth killing leads to the legal embrace of post-birth killing? I don't think it's too long now, and I fear that we're nearing a time where euthanasia will be available to parents who want to murder their own offspring due to the decisions they made and the responsibilities they didn't contemplate on, or even consider, before conception. I know it's a world most of you will regret having created, particularly when the blood of newborns stain the streets and the cries of children echo into the hearts of men. We're not far away now.
Original post by Joel 96
How long is it until the legal embrace of pre-birth killing leads to the legal embrace of post-birth killing? I don't think it's too long now, and I fear that we're nearing a time where euthanasia will be available to parents who want to murder their own offspring due to the decisions they made and the responsibilities they didn't contemplate on, or even consider, before conception. I know it's a world most of you will regret having created, particularly when the blood of newborns stain the streets and the cries of children echo into the hearts of men. We're not far away now.
"The blood of newborns stain the streets and the cries of children echo into the hearts of men"
Again, you're using emotive language on purpose to conjure upsetting images of dead babies. This is *exactly why* I don't think your slippery-slope argument is valid. Killing infants is not going to become popular anytime soon: unfortunately it takes more than cold ethical reasoning to change people's position on ethical issues.
There's a great paper called After-Birth Abortion, Why Should The Baby Live? in the British Journal of Medical Ethics. The authors aren't proposing that we embrace the killing of infants, but they do show how abortion and infanticide are ethically linked. You may instinctively try to use this connection to prove that abortion is just as evil as infanticide, but they make a good case that the correct way to resolve the conflict is to change your beliefs to accept both abortion and infanticide.
The slippery-slope argument is especially unconvincing when you don't explain why, even at the end of the slope, we would be in an ethically undesirable place. While I doubt society will overcome its opposition to after-birth abortion, I don't think it would necessarily be a bad thing if we did.
(edited 7 years ago)
Original post by Cherub012
Since men and women share equal responsibility in using contraception.
Only equal say is no legal ability to pertain an aboriton
Original post by Joel 96
Clearly, empathy is non-existent in you, in the case of dead babies, and you must feel entitled to say that death, as a general rule, has no effect on you in a personal sense, to be so dense on the topic. I don't believe this to be a natural response, this... lack of response.
Just to be clear, empathy is the ability to understand and recognize somebody else's state of mind and disposition, rather than the feeling itself. Do you find it hard relating to people, or moreover, do you find it difficult understanding the reactions of people around you a lot of the time? Cognitive empathy can be measured in stages, with the little things like 'hurting somebody's feelings' coming right at the bottom, with something like 'death' or 'torture' coming at the top. If you have no empathy for the dead, then you will invariably have no empathy for a lot of, or most, other things, which is a troubling idea for me.
The assertion in bold sounds like a general point, as if human nature isn't meant to, or capable, of empathizing for the dead, which is flat-out wrong. Correct me if I've misunderstood your point.
Just to be clear, empathy is the ability to understand and recognize somebody else's state of mind and disposition, rather than the feeling itself. Do you find it hard relating to people, or moreover, do you find it difficult understanding the reactions of people around you a lot of the time? Cognitive empathy can be measured in stages, with the little things like 'hurting somebody's feelings' coming right at the bottom, with something like 'death' or 'torture' coming at the top. If you have no empathy for the dead, then you will invariably have no empathy for a lot of, or most, other things, which is a troubling idea for me.
The assertion in bold sounds like a general point, as if human nature isn't meant to, or capable, of empathizing for the dead, which is flat-out wrong. Correct me if I've misunderstood your point.
Empathy is another's feelings viewed through the lens of the individual. When someone hears someone was tortured for 10 years and says "oh, that's terrible", they imagine that ordeal happening to themselves and react accordingly. When someone hears someone else died peacefully, instantly and painlessly and say "oh, that's terrible", they do not say it is terrible because they are empathising with the person who died, they say it it is terrible because they are empathising with the friends, family, etc. or maybe because they are thinking about their own life and what it would be like if it ended, but then the feeling is merely a trigger to introspection and barely deserves to be called empathy as it doesn't focus on the feelings of the person who died.
Death itself does not invoke empathy, as it is nigh on impossible for humans to understand, and if we cannot understand it, we cannot deal with it through empathy. You can't understand what someone feels when they have an instant, painless, peaceful death, because they feel nothing. There is simply nothing (or at least very little) to empathise with.
I would not feel a lack of response if I killed a baby, especially if it looked at me. However, my response would not really be due to empathy. Any discomfort felt from giving someone a peaceful and painless death is not due to empathy, since there are no feelings to empathise with.
Imagine you are in a room, with a button and a seethrough panel, with another person on the side. They're just living their life, completely unaware. You press the button, and they die instantly. No fear, no pain, no mental or physical or emotional suffering. Now imagine when you press the button, tens of hooks shoot into their skin and hoist them up in the air, rotating them slowly. Or imagine the hook thing happens, but another person sees it and your voice blares into the room telling them they'll be next. Which of those three would make you the least uncomfortable? For me, the answer is clear, and goes to show pain and fear - as might be experienced in neglect or abuse - are the most important types of suffering we should be trying to minimise, especially as the neglected and abused may go on to be detrimental to society.
Western society learnt from natural selection, but the debate on whether human beings are still subjected to natural selection is a debate for another time.
Empathy is more far reaching than Western society, being shown in monkeys at least.
"All sentient beings developed through natural selection in such a way that pleasant sensations serve as their guide, and especially the pleasure derived from sociability and from loving our families."
- Charles Darwin
"Pleasant sensations" do not comprise suffering. Death, however, is not a sensation at all and hence cannot be an unpleasant sensation.
Also, sociability is dependent on the quality of the people around you. If you pump society full of mentally broken, starving people who were forced on their parents it necessarily follows sociability will drop, hence derived pleasure will, hence productivity will.
You must understand, suffering isn't exclusive to the one inflicted. Furthermore, I don't consider the ability to feel pain to be the all-consuming veto over abortion. It's a fallacy that implies human life starts, and is, defined by pain.
My point was that suffering should be avoided. Embryos and zygotes cannot feel pain. Hence, killing them causes no suffering (to them). I do not consider pain to be a metric by which to determine when a life starts, at best it determines the point at which abortions should require anaesthetic.
Slippery slope.
Again, you use the word suffering, as if it's more detrimental than death. Suffering, in its simplest form, is temporary, while death is infinite; they're incomparable. One situation involves two human beings who may or may not be in a positive situation after the birth of one of them, while one involves two human beings with the certain death of one of them. The former is better.
If we are considering the postive situations that may come after, then you are considering what may be, not what is. Hence, if a parent is dirt poot and starving, as well as abusive and an alcoholic and will come into money (and counselling) in ~18 years, aborting when they're poor would be the best option as that logically produces the best potential.
Okay, so you believe that 10% percent of the 163,831 woman, who were definitely affected by the abortion, all had pre-existing mental issues? Quite the statement. Statistics show that women DO get negative post-abortion symptoms whether you like it or not, and these are moderate to high risk psychological problems at play here. People, with a temporary irrational mindset, will always try to go with the short-term and simplest solution, which is almost always death and killing. Long-term it just causes more problems.
Pre-existing mental issues =/= predisposed to mental issues. Predisposition to mental issues correlates strongly with substance abuse, short term relationships and promiscuity, all of which correlate moderately or strongly with abortion, and hence with mental issues caused by abortion - hence, your sample size is not really representative of all women. Regardless, a baby puts far higher stress on the psyche, and leaves less time for socialisation and sleep. That makes it more dangerous psychologically than abortion of a fetus/embryo/zygote, the attachment to which is superficial at best, relative to a full baby.
How is "Fortunately, they didn't have children, so there was no opportunity for negligence and abuse, which would be causing suffering not to just one person, but to two." a slippery slope?
The natural is the human being staying in his/her designated place until the natural changes the circumstances surrounding the human being's development. An early stage consists of the womb being necessary to the child's environmental requirements; that does not render the human being as having no value.
How is it designated though? Hopefully not by where it survives best, otherwise you're stuck in a mire of circular logic.
Suffering < death???
I disagree.
And here's the quote of yours I wanted to present to this discussion,
This response was in reference to me asking h3rmit if he would support "the killing of a post-birth baby before a year old". A post-birth baby before a year-old looks like this:
Now, I realize that h3rmit is a big spokesperson on this forum for the pro-choice side, but doesn't anyone else from the pro-choice abhor and reject such a view? The devaluing of life subsequently leads to this - it always does.
That is a very cute baby. It would make me extremely sad and mentally distressed if I killed it, particularly if it looked at me and was physically close to me. I assume that's what you're preying on, using a purely emotional argument rather than logic.
However, part of being a conscious, sentient organism is looking at the bigger picture. If the family is isolated such that the child cannot be removed and put into care, forcing the parents to maintain the child likely leads to heavy abuse and neglect which doesn't just cause suffering to the child itself, it causes it to society as a whole. And, suffering > death.
Nevertheless, as care does exist and psychological damage is almost guaranteed in this scenario - excluding the case of psychopaths, who hopefully won't be having children anyway - this is a moot, essentially impossible, point in the modern world.
(edited 7 years ago)
No one else should be able to make decisons about your body.
If you aren't the one who has to give birth its not your decision.
If you aren't the one who has to give birth its not your decision.
Original post by feministy
No one else should be able to make decisons about your body.
If you aren't the one who has to give birth its not your decision.
If you aren't the one who has to give birth its not your decision.
decision should be before pregnancy - and whether or not the act is accomplished by another would not demonstrate that the decision is not theirs as well.
there are various acts that any given individual should or should not decide. some are illegal while others are immoral.
Original post by h3rmit
That is a very cute baby. It would make me extremely sad and mentally distressed if I killed it, particularly if it looked at me and was physically close to me. I assume that's what you're preying on, using a purely emotional argument rather than logic.
However, part of being a conscious, sentient organism is looking at the bigger picture. If the family is isolated such that the child cannot be removed and put into care, forcing the parents to maintain the child likely leads to heavy abuse and neglect which doesn't just cause suffering to the child itself, it causes it to society as a whole. And, suffering > death.
Nevertheless, as care does exist and psychological damage is almost guaranteed in this scenario - excluding the case of psychopaths, who hopefully won't be having children anyway - this is a moot, essentially impossible, point in the modern world.
That is a very cute baby. It would make me extremely sad and mentally distressed if I killed it, particularly if it looked at me and was physically close to me. I assume that's what you're preying on, using a purely emotional argument rather than logic.
However, part of being a conscious, sentient organism is looking at the bigger picture. If the family is isolated such that the child cannot be removed and put into care, forcing the parents to maintain the child likely leads to heavy abuse and neglect which doesn't just cause suffering to the child itself, it causes it to society as a whole. And, suffering > death.
Nevertheless, as care does exist and psychological damage is almost guaranteed in this scenario - excluding the case of psychopaths, who hopefully won't be having children anyway - this is a moot, essentially impossible, point in the modern world.
Talk about an emotional appeal. "child likely leads to heavy abuse and neglect which causes suffering [for child and society]."
if we were considering this as a logical as possible, then we would not assume the child's life (when unexpected) is going to be consumed in suffering their entire life. An unknown environment would remain unknown.
we would not assume "suffering" to be a horrible thing either because every single human suffers. that is recognized in everyone's life.
Instead, we would consider words such as those of Don Marquis, who recognized that induced abortion denies human beings a future like our own.
http://www.prolifehumanists.org/secular-case-against-abortion/
Abortion is an emotionally complex issue, stacked with distressing circumstances that elicit our sympathy and compassion, but abortion is not morally complex: If the preborn are not human beings equally worthy of our compassion and support, no justification for abortion is required. Women should maintain full autonomy over their bodies and make their own decisions about their pregnancies. However, if the preborn are human beings, no justification for abortion is morally adequate, if such a reason cannot justify ending the life of a toddler or any born human in similar circumstances.
Would we kill a two year-old whose father suddenly abandons his unemployed mother, in order to ease the mother’s budget or prevent the child from growing up in poverty? Would we dismember a young preschooler if there were indications she might grow up in an abusive home? If the preborn are indeed human beings, we have a social duty to find compassionate ways to support women, that do not require the death of one in order to solve the problems of the other.
A strict logical analysis towards the situation should recognize pre-born are human, and we should not kill other humans. regardless to our own desire.
(edited 7 years ago)
Original post by Cherub012
Since men and women share equal responsibility in using contraception.
depends on how consensual the sex was. if it was both parties agreeing to sex then yes. if otherwise, then woman has more rights I say
No, men should get a say of whether or not they pay for the child, but nothing as to whether or not it's aborted.
Original post by Cherub012
If a woman rapes a man and gets impregnated as a result, who gets to decide in this case? 
hmm, depends if the man knows. I would say both should get a say in that case
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