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Throughout the abortion forum it frequently comes up that the pro-choice contingent argues from a position of bigotry via ageism to create an excuse for promoting abortion especially abortion on demand.
This situation recently appeared in a couple of current threads here, and rather than derail those topics, I decided to create a thread for the matter of its own.
As a matter of calibrating the issue .. a human begins to live at conception (or at "conception-equivalent" events for the nit-picky among us), and a ZEF (zygote/embryo/fetus, the generally referenced growth stages of a human in the womb referenced in this forum) is a human that is alive, alive as alive can be, this according to the hard-science consensus of taxonomy, phylogeny, anthropology, biology, genetics-DNA, organism-life, embryology .. a consensus that has existed since the mid-late 1970s, for well more than 35 years, and is quite well known.
And, of course, the truth of that fact is not a matter for rational conjecture, despite intellectualistic distortions to the contrary of pro-choice sophisters.
Indeed, it is the reality of the truth of it that makes abortion the extremely controversial topic that it is, obviously, compared to, let's say, an appendectomy, as what's foundationally different between abortion and any other chemical/pharmaceutical/surgical procedure is what's being removed and, in the case of abortion, killed during an abortion: a living human, alive as alive can be prior to the abortion.
Because there are many reasons that abortion is chosen, specific to the situation, discussion often focuses on the reason for abortion, and to save the woman's life or prevent the woman from suffering subsequent grave health, most people acknowledge that Darwinian "survival of the fittest" legitimate self-defense scenario as being a tolerable reason for abortion, to kill another living human, and others add rape and incest, especially of a minor, to that list for life/health reasons without a ton of opposition.
Killing, as humanity has learned, is a way of life for our species, not attempting to be trite or trivialize killing; that's just simply the way it is.
But as we have evolved and become more civilized, as our social evolution is sometimes described, humanity has made "right and wrong" decisions/judgments about behaviors to, over time, create a general standard of ethics/morality for humanity's conduct of affairs with each other. One of those ethics is "do not kill" .. unless it's justified. Thus murder, for instance, is considered wrong, obviously, as the social definition of murder itself makes it the unjustified killing of another human.
And justification itself has, over the centuries and millennia, evolved to its present ethics/morality, where in self-defense, in the act of unavoidable self-defense of one's very life/grave-heath-prevention, killing is tolerated without social or legal penalty, though still not often without some PTSD on the part of the even justified killer, the affective nature of civilized non-sociopathic people being what it is.
There are, however, a number of reasons given for various behaviors that are considered in today's civilized ethics/morality to be unjustified reasons for a particular behavior, reasons relegated to the egregious category of mere self-serving excuses, void of ethics and morality, indeed, excuses that are unethical and immoral.
One such egregious excuse for behavior is bigotry. Bigotry is not considered to be an ethic or moral, but an unethical and immoral excuse, unjustified to the behavior it excuses.
Examples in history of bigotry as an excuse for unethical/immoral behavior are the bigotry towards another because of the color of their skin that excused the abomination of slavery and bigotry towards another because of their ethnicity/religion that excused the horror of The Holocaust.
Which brings me to the topic of this thread: the bigotry of ageism as it is used to excuse abortion, the killing of a human, when the killer's life/serious-grave-health is not threatened; the appeal to that human's age as an excuse to do a terrible thing to that human. Thus, the bigotry of ageism excusing abortion.
Many pro-choicers arguing in favor of abortion, especially abortion on demand, cite a number of arbitrary conditions about the human being aborted that, to them, justify the abortion, the killing of that human.
Some of them say it doesn't yet look like a human (an arbitrary subjective and quite biased perspective, laughably so to an honest topically-relevant scientist) and that, to them, until it reaches an age growth stage that it does "look like" a human, justifies aborting that human, killing that human.
Some of them say that it can't yet feel anything, that it hasn't reached the age where its brain is sufficiently developed to feel pain, and that justifies aborting that human (also a challengeable assertion at certain growth stages, too).
Some of them say that if the human hasn't yet reached the growth stage where that human could survive outside the womb even with medical assistance, known as not having yet reached the age of "viability", that that justifies aborting, killing that human, on demand.
Some of them say that the prenatal human, alive as alive can be, has not yet reached the point in its growth of achieving the philosophical/religious status of a human "being", and though historically and contemporarily quite debatable, they say it simply hasn't been alive long enough to reach that status and that's an okay reason to justify aborting that human, to kill that human.
And some of them say that the prenatal human, alive as alive can be, has not yet reached the point in its life of achieving the social/legal status of being a "person", and though that too is quite debatable, with various statutes as well throughout our land stating either way, they may point to Roe v. Wade's declination to state on the matter and say it simply isn't old enough yet to be a person and that's an okay reason to justify aborting that human, to justify killing that human on demand.
And though there are other similar-categorized reasons pro-choicers give in addition to these, all of these perspectives have one categorical thing in common: they're obviously all about an appeal to the age of the living human under consideration of being aborted, of being killed, as that human not yet being old enough [insert age-growth-stage related excuse] not to be killed on demand.
Now, we appeal to age all the time as a demarcation for a number of things, like when a child should start kindergarten, when a teen can get a learner's permit to drive, the minimum age to obtain a driver's license, a marriage license, the age when voting is allowed, joining the military, buying booze, getting Medicare, the age for retiring on social security, etc., etc. And all of these appeals to age are acceptable in our civilized society as ethical/moral demarcations for these events, understandably, as the age represents an event-ability, the event-ability an age, societally inseparably, at which point qualification occurs for the activity in question.
But an appeal to age as a demarcation for the event of killing another completely healthy human not relevantly harming anyone??? No, obviously, that's unacceptable!!!
And like those unacceptable appeals to skin-color for slavery and ethnicity/religion for exterminating the Jews in The Holocaust, an appeal to age for killing another human is obviously a bigotry, the bigotry of ageism, an unethical/immoral excuse to terminate the life of a completely healthy human that isn't threatening the life/health of anyone and is otherwise destined to live a presumably long life, nowadays into their 90s maybe.
Yes, all of the aforementioned excuses pro-choicers give appealing to the growth-state or status age of the prenatal living human for killing on demand the prenatal human are simply that: excuses via appeal to the bigotry of ageism.
Yet they make these bigoted excuses for killing another human with apparent matter-of-fact detachedness, as if, "well, yeah, of course -- what's the issue?".
And that's cause for concern in our society, as there's a sociopathic air to that perspective that is unhealthy for humans and society in general as a transferable concept, as both surviving Jews and ancestors of slaves will tell you.
What's more, most of those appealing to the bigotry of age for killing prenatal humans on demand are outraged when some white supremacist states that "Blacks are inferior" or some neo-NAZI says "the Jews were a blight upon Germany". These same people who utilize the bigotry of ageism to excuse the killing of another human via abortion get all outraged at other forms of bigotry used as excuses to do horrific things to humans, but are, apparently, "blind" to their own appeal to bigotry to excuse their horrific advocation of killing prenatal humans on demand.
The term for that kind of contradiction in a person is: hypocrisy.
And, too, some of those employing this obvious bigotry of ageism as their excuse to kill prenatal humans on demand reply, when confronted with the truth of it, the obvious truth of it, that "no, that's not what I'm saying ..." and then go off on some rationalized intellectualism defense mechanism tangent that in no way distances them from the reality of their egregious bigoted perspective, even if they might want to think that it does, but merely adds to their list of excuses for their bigotry, not to dissimilar to how The South rationalized via laundry-list the slavery of colored people.
I have watched, over the years, as pro-choicers consistently presented the bigotry of ageism as their excuse for killing prenatal humans via abortion, complete with self-justifying laundry list veil of subterfuge for their bigotry, and wondered what the heck are these people thinking, are they really that clueless, that desensitized, to what they're saying??? And at times when I called them on it, I received mostly obfuscating sophistry for my efforts, obfuscating sophistry about the qualifying status being "different" from the obviously inseparable age when those events occur (like the motor-skill development at age 15.5 sufficient for driving) and other laughably lame twisted excuses.
But that's neither here nor there.
The bigotry of ageism to excuse the killing of prenatal humans is, obviously, what it is, and, in my opinion, in a civilized ethical and moral society, such egregiousness should not be tolerated!
Discuss.
This situation recently appeared in a couple of current threads here, and rather than derail those topics, I decided to create a thread for the matter of its own.
As a matter of calibrating the issue .. a human begins to live at conception (or at "conception-equivalent" events for the nit-picky among us), and a ZEF (zygote/embryo/fetus, the generally referenced growth stages of a human in the womb referenced in this forum) is a human that is alive, alive as alive can be, this according to the hard-science consensus of taxonomy, phylogeny, anthropology, biology, genetics-DNA, organism-life, embryology .. a consensus that has existed since the mid-late 1970s, for well more than 35 years, and is quite well known.
And, of course, the truth of that fact is not a matter for rational conjecture, despite intellectualistic distortions to the contrary of pro-choice sophisters.
Indeed, it is the reality of the truth of it that makes abortion the extremely controversial topic that it is, obviously, compared to, let's say, an appendectomy, as what's foundationally different between abortion and any other chemical/pharmaceutical/surgical procedure is what's being removed and, in the case of abortion, killed during an abortion: a living human, alive as alive can be prior to the abortion.
Because there are many reasons that abortion is chosen, specific to the situation, discussion often focuses on the reason for abortion, and to save the woman's life or prevent the woman from suffering subsequent grave health, most people acknowledge that Darwinian "survival of the fittest" legitimate self-defense scenario as being a tolerable reason for abortion, to kill another living human, and others add rape and incest, especially of a minor, to that list for life/health reasons without a ton of opposition.
Killing, as humanity has learned, is a way of life for our species, not attempting to be trite or trivialize killing; that's just simply the way it is.
But as we have evolved and become more civilized, as our social evolution is sometimes described, humanity has made "right and wrong" decisions/judgments about behaviors to, over time, create a general standard of ethics/morality for humanity's conduct of affairs with each other. One of those ethics is "do not kill" .. unless it's justified. Thus murder, for instance, is considered wrong, obviously, as the social definition of murder itself makes it the unjustified killing of another human.
And justification itself has, over the centuries and millennia, evolved to its present ethics/morality, where in self-defense, in the act of unavoidable self-defense of one's very life/grave-heath-prevention, killing is tolerated without social or legal penalty, though still not often without some PTSD on the part of the even justified killer, the affective nature of civilized non-sociopathic people being what it is.
There are, however, a number of reasons given for various behaviors that are considered in today's civilized ethics/morality to be unjustified reasons for a particular behavior, reasons relegated to the egregious category of mere self-serving excuses, void of ethics and morality, indeed, excuses that are unethical and immoral.
One such egregious excuse for behavior is bigotry. Bigotry is not considered to be an ethic or moral, but an unethical and immoral excuse, unjustified to the behavior it excuses.
Examples in history of bigotry as an excuse for unethical/immoral behavior are the bigotry towards another because of the color of their skin that excused the abomination of slavery and bigotry towards another because of their ethnicity/religion that excused the horror of The Holocaust.
Which brings me to the topic of this thread: the bigotry of ageism as it is used to excuse abortion, the killing of a human, when the killer's life/serious-grave-health is not threatened; the appeal to that human's age as an excuse to do a terrible thing to that human. Thus, the bigotry of ageism excusing abortion.
Many pro-choicers arguing in favor of abortion, especially abortion on demand, cite a number of arbitrary conditions about the human being aborted that, to them, justify the abortion, the killing of that human.
Some of them say it doesn't yet look like a human (an arbitrary subjective and quite biased perspective, laughably so to an honest topically-relevant scientist) and that, to them, until it reaches an age growth stage that it does "look like" a human, justifies aborting that human, killing that human.
Some of them say that it can't yet feel anything, that it hasn't reached the age where its brain is sufficiently developed to feel pain, and that justifies aborting that human (also a challengeable assertion at certain growth stages, too).
Some of them say that if the human hasn't yet reached the growth stage where that human could survive outside the womb even with medical assistance, known as not having yet reached the age of "viability", that that justifies aborting, killing that human, on demand.
Some of them say that the prenatal human, alive as alive can be, has not yet reached the point in its growth of achieving the philosophical/religious status of a human "being", and though historically and contemporarily quite debatable, they say it simply hasn't been alive long enough to reach that status and that's an okay reason to justify aborting that human, to kill that human.
And some of them say that the prenatal human, alive as alive can be, has not yet reached the point in its life of achieving the social/legal status of being a "person", and though that too is quite debatable, with various statutes as well throughout our land stating either way, they may point to Roe v. Wade's declination to state on the matter and say it simply isn't old enough yet to be a person and that's an okay reason to justify aborting that human, to justify killing that human on demand.
And though there are other similar-categorized reasons pro-choicers give in addition to these, all of these perspectives have one categorical thing in common: they're obviously all about an appeal to the age of the living human under consideration of being aborted, of being killed, as that human not yet being old enough [insert age-growth-stage related excuse] not to be killed on demand.
Now, we appeal to age all the time as a demarcation for a number of things, like when a child should start kindergarten, when a teen can get a learner's permit to drive, the minimum age to obtain a driver's license, a marriage license, the age when voting is allowed, joining the military, buying booze, getting Medicare, the age for retiring on social security, etc., etc. And all of these appeals to age are acceptable in our civilized society as ethical/moral demarcations for these events, understandably, as the age represents an event-ability, the event-ability an age, societally inseparably, at which point qualification occurs for the activity in question.
But an appeal to age as a demarcation for the event of killing another completely healthy human not relevantly harming anyone??? No, obviously, that's unacceptable!!!
And like those unacceptable appeals to skin-color for slavery and ethnicity/religion for exterminating the Jews in The Holocaust, an appeal to age for killing another human is obviously a bigotry, the bigotry of ageism, an unethical/immoral excuse to terminate the life of a completely healthy human that isn't threatening the life/health of anyone and is otherwise destined to live a presumably long life, nowadays into their 90s maybe.
Yes, all of the aforementioned excuses pro-choicers give appealing to the growth-state or status age of the prenatal living human for killing on demand the prenatal human are simply that: excuses via appeal to the bigotry of ageism.
Yet they make these bigoted excuses for killing another human with apparent matter-of-fact detachedness, as if, "well, yeah, of course -- what's the issue?".
And that's cause for concern in our society, as there's a sociopathic air to that perspective that is unhealthy for humans and society in general as a transferable concept, as both surviving Jews and ancestors of slaves will tell you.
What's more, most of those appealing to the bigotry of age for killing prenatal humans on demand are outraged when some white supremacist states that "Blacks are inferior" or some neo-NAZI says "the Jews were a blight upon Germany". These same people who utilize the bigotry of ageism to excuse the killing of another human via abortion get all outraged at other forms of bigotry used as excuses to do horrific things to humans, but are, apparently, "blind" to their own appeal to bigotry to excuse their horrific advocation of killing prenatal humans on demand.
The term for that kind of contradiction in a person is: hypocrisy.
And, too, some of those employing this obvious bigotry of ageism as their excuse to kill prenatal humans on demand reply, when confronted with the truth of it, the obvious truth of it, that "no, that's not what I'm saying ..." and then go off on some rationalized intellectualism defense mechanism tangent that in no way distances them from the reality of their egregious bigoted perspective, even if they might want to think that it does, but merely adds to their list of excuses for their bigotry, not to dissimilar to how The South rationalized via laundry-list the slavery of colored people.
I have watched, over the years, as pro-choicers consistently presented the bigotry of ageism as their excuse for killing prenatal humans via abortion, complete with self-justifying laundry list veil of subterfuge for their bigotry, and wondered what the heck are these people thinking, are they really that clueless, that desensitized, to what they're saying??? And at times when I called them on it, I received mostly obfuscating sophistry for my efforts, obfuscating sophistry about the qualifying status being "different" from the obviously inseparable age when those events occur (like the motor-skill development at age 15.5 sufficient for driving) and other laughably lame twisted excuses.
But that's neither here nor there.
The bigotry of ageism to excuse the killing of prenatal humans is, obviously, what it is, and, in my opinion, in a civilized ethical and moral society, such egregiousness should not be tolerated!
Discuss.
