• This is a political forum that is non-biased/non-partisan and treats every person's position on topics equally. This debate forum is not aligned to any political party. In today's politics, many ideas are split between and even within all the political parties. Often we find ourselves agreeing on one platform but some topics break our mold. We are here to discuss them in a civil political debate. If this is your first visit to our political forums, be sure to check out the RULES. Registering for debate politics is necessary before posting. Register today to participate - it's free!

Seeking feedback for a pro-life allegory

sangha said:
No it would not but let's be honest and not confuse cordiality with respect for each other's positions. I can be both cordial and honest and say, without absolutely no rancor, that I have no respect for your position.

Can you do the same? Or will continue with the conceit that you respect something of mine that you wish to take away?

And if you want to debate something, that's fine but just be aware that you don't get to set the rules. Insisting that you get to set the rules is as "cordial" as trying to take other people's rights away is "respectful"
Click to expand...

I don't respect your view... I respect your opinion, and your right to have it.

There. Our first middle ground :) .

Now give this a try:

1) Killing an adult (except in extreme circumstance) is morally wrong because you are robbing them of a future like ours
2) A fetus has a future like ours
3) Therefore killing a fetus (except in extreme circumstances) is morally wrong.

How would you modify this to align with your viewpoint? For example:

1) Killing an adult is morally wrong because of XYZ
2) A fetus does not have XYZ
3) Therefore kill a fetus is not morally wrong.
 
crhurd said:
I don't respect your view... I respect your opinion, and your right to have it.
Click to expand...

No, you don't respect my opinion. If you're going to go on about cordiality and respect, at least have enough respect to be honest with me about that. All you respect is other people's right to have that opinion but you do not respect their ability to act on it. Not one bit. That's why you want to take *that* right away from others.

There. Our first middle ground :) .
Click to expand...

All we have is an agreement that we are allowed to think what we want which is of political insignificance. The critical difference is that you would like to deprive others of acting in a way you disapprove of simply because *you* disapprove of it. I, on the other hand, am more than willing to allow you to behave according to your opposition to abortion. In fact, I will encourage you to never have an abortion. I would never even think of forcing you, or anyone else, to have an abortion.

And that, my cordial friend, is the difference between respecting someone's right to have an opinion, and respecting their opinion and their right to act on it.


Now give this a try:

1) Killing an adult (except in extreme circumstance) is morally wrong because you are robbing them of a future like ours
2) A fetus has a future like ours
3) Therefore killing a fetus (except in extreme circumstances) is morally wrong.

How would you modify this to align with your viewpoint? For example:

1) Killing an adult is morally wrong because of XYZ
2) A fetus does not have XYZ
3) Therefore kill a fetus is not morally wrong.
Click to expand...

I would answer that morality alone is not sufficient to justify a law but if you want to think abortion is morally wrong, I will not stand in your way and use the force of govt to prevent you from not having an abortion.
 
crhurd said:
Hello all! This is going to be a bit of a long post, particularly for my first one on this forum... so I apologize in advance and congratulate those of you who read it in it's entirety.

The purpose of this post is that I want to get your opinion on an allegory that I have come up with... particularly from a philosophical perspective. I'm looking for holes in it so that I can either abandon it or modify it.

The objective of the allegory is to isolate a fetus and infant so that the act of birthing itself is the only difference between a fetus and infant... ie, I preserve the "physical threat" via the "hard labor" portion of the allegory. What I am trying to determine is what happens precisely during the birthing process that pro-choicers define as "personhood".

Here it goes:
"A poor mother in a third world country who does manual labor for a living births a child. The infant is unresponsive and is immediately put on life support... It cannot breathe on it's own, and is not conscious. However it will be fine within the next 3 days.
The mother regrets her decision to have the child because in order to feed it she will need to harm her body by working longer hours which is just as physically demanding as being pregnant. Thus, raising the child will make her a slave and violate her bodily autonomy.
But the hospital will not kill the infant and they will not arrange for an adoption, so she smothers it to death.
Is her action morally wrong? Explain."

Please don't respond with a "that would never happen!" or a "it is because it is!"... I respect everyone's opinion but let's avoid the ad hominem if possible :) .
Click to expand...

This is an interesting scenario, but it's more of a hypothetical than an allegory, because it does not carefully parallel real life.

I would say the woman's actions would be morally wrong (but not rise to the level of first degree murder).I would also say that the actions of the hospital and the society in which she exists are morally wrong.

I don't think you need the part about the "unresponsive, on life support, okay in three days," however, because that doesn't really add to the hypothetical. It's just confusing. You can just say - "Is it okay for a poor woman to smother her newborn if she feels there is no other options for her?"

If you're trying to create an allegory that compares the right of an infant to life three days before or after birth, I don't think you'll have much success because most pro-choicers do not support aborting a full-term infant unless the mother will perish in childbirth. That's why the "unresponsive but okay in three days" doesn't compute for me.

For me - both the mother and the society in which she lives have created the environment for her act of smothering the baby.
 
crhurd said:
Siamese twins are born. One of them is mentally competent (let’s call him “Joe”) and one of them has the mental capacity of an infant (let’s call him “Bob”).

Over the course of their lifetime their parents and family all die, leaving them alone in the world. For legal purposes Joe decides to become Bob’s legal guardian so for all intents and purposes Joe is now Bob’s parent.

Medical progress allows for a new procedure that will allow Bob and Joe to become separated, but it’s very new so they must wait 9 months for the procedure. However Joe is afraid of the prospects of always having to care for Bob, so before the surgery he shoots Bob in the head.

Was Joe’s action morally wrong? Explain.
Click to expand...

Because they could not be successfully separated yet - Joe has, in fact, committed suicide. There are many ethics involved in separating conjoined twins, which cannot be compared to abortion if you ask me.
 
crhurd said:
Hello all! This is going to be a bit of a long post, particularly for my first one on this forum... so I apologize in advance and congratulate those of you who read it in it's entirety.

The purpose of this post is that I want to get your opinion on an allegory that I have come up with... particularly from a philosophical perspective. I'm looking for holes in it so that I can either abandon it or modify it.

The objective of the allegory is to isolate a fetus and infant so that the act of birthing itself is the only difference between a fetus and infant... ie, I preserve the "physical threat" via the "hard labor" portion of the allegory. What I am trying to determine is what happens precisely during the birthing process that pro-choicers define as "personhood".

Here it goes:
"A poor mother in a third world country who does manual labor for a living births a child. The infant is unresponsive and is immediately put on life support... It cannot breathe on it's own, and is not conscious. However it will be fine within the next 3 days.
The mother regrets her decision to have the child because in order to feed it she will need to harm her body by working longer hours which is just as physically demanding as being pregnant. Thus, raising the child will make her a slave and violate her bodily autonomy.
But the hospital will not kill the infant and they will not arrange for an adoption, so she smothers it to death.
Is her action morally wrong? Explain."

Please don't respond with a "that would never happen!" or a "it is because it is!"... I respect everyone's opinion but let's avoid the ad hominem if possible :) .
Click to expand...

She should have killed it a few days earlier. Then the whole question would not have surfaced. But a lot of children are put out in the rice fields to die in the third world. Others starve slowly. The lucky ones among the poor find illicit red light work, till we find the studios and kill the jobs. ;)
 
sangha said:
No, you don't respect my opinion. If you're going to go on about cordiality and respect, at least have enough respect to be honest with me about that. All you respect is other people's right to have that opinion but you do not respect their ability to act on it. Not one bit. That's why you want to take *that* right away from others.
Click to expand...

Sure, I agree with that.

All we have is an agreement that we are allowed to think what we want which is of political insignificance. The critical difference is that you would like to deprive others of acting in a way you disapprove of simply because *you* disapprove of it. I, on the other hand, am more than willing to allow you to behave according to your opposition to abortion. In fact, I will encourage you to never have an abortion. I would never even think of forcing you, or anyone else, to have an abortion.

And that, my cordial friend, is the difference between respecting someone's right to have an opinion, and respecting their opinion and their right to act on it.
Click to expand...

I don't really see anything here I disagree with either.

I would answer that morality alone is not sufficient to justify a law but if you want to think abortion is morally wrong, I will not stand in your way and use the force of govt to prevent you from not having an abortion.
Click to expand...

Much appreciated.

I also agree that morality is an insufficient reason to have a law... for example, I could lie to you on this forum, which would be "morally wrong"... but there's no law precluding me from doing so.

I'm not a lawyer, and I would have made a very bad framer of the Constitution... so I won't pretend to know how abortion laws in the US should change.

But the morality of the discussion is an intriguing one to me.
 
HowardBThiname said:
Because they could not be successfully separated yet - Joe has, in fact, committed suicide. There are many ethics involved in separating conjoined twins, which cannot be compared to abortion if you ask me.
Click to expand...

Interesting.
 
crhurd said:
Sure, I agree with that.



I don't really see anything here I disagree with either.



Much appreciated.

I also agree that morality is an insufficient reason to have a law... for example, I could lie to you on this forum, which would be "morally wrong"... but there's no law precluding me from doing so.

I'm not a lawyer, and I would have made a very bad framer of the Constitution... so I won't pretend to know how abortion laws in the US should change.

But the morality of the discussion is an intriguing one to me.
Click to expand...

To be honest, the morality of abortion doesn't interest me at all. But then, I have no interest in imposing my moral code on others and even if I did, I do not think the govt is an appropriate means for doing so.

However, I am interested in hearing how you can morally justify the use of govt force to enforce your own moral code in a democracy that has rejected your morals (at least with respect to abortion)?
 
HowardBThiname said:
Because they could not be successfully separated yet - Joe has, in fact, committed suicide. There are many ethics involved in separating conjoined twins, which cannot be compared to abortion if you ask me.
Click to expand...

I agree.

A better question is :

How can a conjoined twin kill his twin and survive?

Poison kills both since they are so intimately connected.
Stabbing or gunshot causes blood loss which will kill both.
Cutting off the air supply such as strangulation or other methods causes cell death in the twin , and as the cells die
toxins will kill the other twin.

Now they are both dead.

In the case of the fetus and the woman ...if the woman dies a pre-viable fetus will never survive even if removed quickly and given the best medical care including artificial life support.

The pre viable fetus is getting it's life functions from the live woman.
 
crhurd said:
Hello all! This is going to be a bit of a long post, particularly for my first one on this forum... so I apologize in advance and congratulate those of you who read it in it's entirety.

The purpose of this post is that I want to get your opinion on an allegory that I have come up with... particularly from a philosophical perspective. I'm looking for holes in it so that I can either abandon it or modify it.

The objective of the allegory is to isolate a fetus and infant so that the act of birthing itself is the only difference between a fetus and infant... ie, I preserve the "physical threat" via the "hard labor" portion of the allegory. What I am trying to determine is what happens precisely during the birthing process that pro-choicers define as "personhood".

Here it goes:
"A poor mother in a third world country who does manual labor for a living births a child. The infant is unresponsive and is immediately put on life support... It cannot breathe on it's own, and is not conscious. However it will be fine within the next 3 days.
The mother regrets her decision to have the child because in order to feed it she will need to harm her body by working longer hours which is just as physically demanding as being pregnant. Thus, raising the child will make her a slave and violate her bodily autonomy.
But the hospital will not kill the infant and they will not arrange for an adoption, so she smothers it to death.
Is her action morally wrong? Explain."

Please don't respond with a "that would never happen!" or a "it is because it is!"... I respect everyone's opinion but let's avoid the ad hominem if possible :) .
Click to expand...

I guess I will not participate then, because the hypotheticals in the OP...including the ethics implied....are no more likely in America than a scenario based on "what if men got pregnant?"

Our rights are man-made concepts and are subjective. That subjectivity is not arbitrary but often is not perfect...because it cannot be. Women and the unborn cannot be treated equally, thus society, man, the law, etc must make a decision that is not only based on law but on ethical, practical, and real considerations and the *impacts* of such on individuals, an entire gender, and society.


At a certain point, complete adherence to an ideology is nothing more than hypothetical self-indulgence IMO, if it cannot support a foundation of reality and fairness.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top Bottom