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Why do we condone pre-birth abortions and not post-birth abortions?

Actually I support abortion through the eighty-seventh trimester.

Did you actually calculate that out to be age 21, or did you just get lucky in your number selection?
 
Correct that is your mistake since that's not the definition of abortion. Now you can avoid your mistake in the future.

Your mistake. Any individual stopping the life force of any living thing, intentional or not, is indeed killing it, be it a plant, an insect, an animal, or anything that is living. The only real question is whether or not the killing is morally allowable or not.
 
Did you actually calculate that out to be age 21, or did you just get lucky in your number selection?

Does 21 look accidental to you?
 
Does 21 look accidental to you?

Stranger things have happened. It could have been a subconscious calculation on your part. I don't know if you are a mathematical savant or not!
 
Stranger things have happened. It could have been a subconscious calculation on your part. I don't know if you are a mathematical savant or not!

Granted, if I had lived in Canada that number probably would have been 75.
 
Why is your opinion superior to theirs, regarding their wanting to die?

I never stated my opinion was superior.

Being able to discern the signs of mental illness and help people with mental illness is not an opinion no more than spotting the signs of a stroke and rushing someone to the hospital. Spotting the warning signs of metal illness can not only prevent suicide but a lot of the mass shootings that are associated with such depression. I also believe a lot of criminals have some form of mental illness as well. Not acknowledging mental illness is just as stupid as not acknowledging diabetes, heart disease, cancer, or other physical ailments.

One of Hitler's mad endeavors was to encourage women to breed, breed, breed, and breed some more, to produce lots of future soldiers for Hitler's wars. Generically, that mad endeavor originated thousands of years ago, and has been embraced by every power-mad individual and group in History, from the Hebrews to ISIS (and including just about ALL Religions in-between).

So imagine what History might have been like if women had refused to go along with the breed-breed-breed-and-breed-some-more program. NONE of those power-mad individuals and groups would have had the manpower to make war....

So this is your explanation of why it is a good idea to extinguish life before birth. It would prevent war. Everyone is entitled to their opinion.

Assuming you are talking about your own child, perhaps now you understand why abortion is legal. An unborn human is NOT a "child"; it is a very different entity, since it has a placenta as a vital organ --do you see any ordinary children (or babies, either, for that matter) with attached placentas as vital organs? For a lot more information about the HUGE differences between unborn humans and the born, see this page. Therefore abortion, the killing of an unborn human entity, does not actually kill a "baby" or "child". So, if you "do not want a child", abortion lets you kill something that isn't one, before it becomes one. Simple!

I am informed on the many stages and development of human life from the embryo through old age. To think that it is OK to terminate the life at one stage verses another is barbaric in my opinion.

I am sure in the future we will continue to evolve and will one day protect a person from conception to death. My opinion.


Your mere say-so is worthless without evidence. Perhaps you should become informed of the "cuticle cell argument" some time.

I think you need to ask some people if they believe human life is significant and I am sure you will find lots of people who believe as I do. Then you will have the evidence I already know is out there.
 
I think there is a significant difference between me going to war and killing the enemy soldier to stop a mad man such as Hitler vs grabbing a child and breaking his or her neck because I do not want a child.
Perhaps you are not familiar with how abortion is performed and what is involved, clearly you are not, but tell me where in your narrative about killing enemy soldiers, who may or may not wish you ill, comes in the countless people who dies say in the Dresden fire bombings or Hiroshima?

All human lives are significant.
Yet we are willing to kill when it suits our "political" needs.

You also conveniently left out the other reasons people dies due to human activity or lack of it. So much for significance of human life.
 
Perhaps you are not familiar with how abortion is performed and what is involved, clearly you are not, but tell me where in your narrative about killing enemy soldiers, who may or may not wish you ill, comes in the countless people who dies say in the Dresden fire bombings or Hiroshima?

If you wish to discuss the WW2 and the consequences (the Dresden fire bombings as well as the use of the atomic bomb) of starting a world war I most likely join in. Start a thread.

Yet we are willing to kill when it suits our "political" needs.

There is no question we have and will go to war when it suits our political need. Whether it is stopping Germany or Japan from starting a world war of Isis threatening our freedom and way of life we will kill if that is the way to stop them. But again that is another thread .

You also conveniently left out the other reasons people dies due to human activity or lack of it. So much for significance of human life.[/QUOTE]

I am sorry but abortion terminates a human life. I believe human life needs to be protected at all stages.
 
Here is the main differences between the two conditions, or situations if you prefer. Post birth, while the individual is indeed reliant on others to care for it, it is not reliant on any other specific individual(s). Pre-birth the individual is physically tied to a specific other individual. This makes for a unique situation that has no other true equivalent
All placental mammals have offspring tied to their mothers during pre-birth development, so the situation isn't quite as unique as you say. And humans aren't the only mammals that typically have one offspring at a time (gorillas, hippos, dolphins, most large herbivores from antelope to zebra). Then there is the additional fact that the "physical tie" between mother and offspring isn't inseparable; the drug RU-486 can force a disconnection to happen, at least in the early part of a pregnancy. That last thing is one of the reasons an unborn human can be compared to a leech or lamprey or certain other parasites (more non-unique-ness, that is).
 
I never stated my opinion was superior.
Yet somehow you think there is such a thing as a right to interfere with choices made by others, regarding themselves.

Being able to discern the signs of mental illness
And who defines "mental illness"? How would you like it if other folks arbitrarily declared that opposition to abortion was a sign of mental illness --erroneously thinking there is such a thing as a right to interfere with choices made by others, regarding themselves? Especially when the claim that abortion affects another person is provably false!!! (Because persons are minds, not bodies.)

and help people with mental illness
There you go again, making unproved assumptions, like the one about whether or not someone else wants help, or that you have some sort of right to interfere.

is not an opinion
FALSE, as just explained above.

no more than spotting the signs of a stroke and rushing someone to the hospital.
A stroke is definitely something that is independent of an opinion. Identifying its signs, however, sometimes is a matter of opinion (usually when the stroke is very mild). And rushing the alleged stroke victim to the hospital almost always involves the opinion that they want to be saved. How do you know for sure, if you didn't ask in advance?

Spotting the warning signs of metal illness can not only prevent suicide
Yet in the Far East suicide was for many centuries considered to be an honorable action. Do you know why? Because the place was overpopulated for many centuries! Which is why all claims that "human life has intrinsic value" are provably false. The Law of Supply and Demand applies to everything, period.

but a lot of the mass shootings that are associated with such depression.
I want to see you provide some evidence supporting that claim. Thanks in advance!

I also believe a lot of criminals have some form of mental illness as well.
Most crimes can be directly traced to "excess selfishness". The criminals are basically all saying, "What **I** want is more important than what anyone/everyone else wants." The real problem for Society is to accurately define "excess", because every life-form on the planet is inherently selfish (feeding your face IS a selfish act, see?), and so there is a degree of selfishness that must be accepted/tolerated by Society.

Not acknowledging mental illness is just as stupid as not acknowledging diabetes, heart disease, cancer, or other physical ailments.
ACTUAL ailments definitely need to be acknowledged. And since the mind is in-essence "software getting processed", and since software often has "bugs", it is perfectly logical that the mind can ail, too. Here is where extensive knowledge of computers comes in handy. Because sometimes certain aspects of software are simultaneously called "features" and "bugs" by different people. Who is right?

An exact example of "feature or bug" relates to the phenomenon called "homosexuality", a sexual preference for one's own gender. Lots of cultures declare it to be a bug, but the fact is, that declaration was arbitrarily made without knowledge of all the relevant facts. Hundreds of millions of years ago, when life-forms invented sexual reproduction, all that started reproducing that way were "hermaphrodites", with each individual having both sexes. Some species still are hermaphroditic today (earthworms, certain snails, and more). Now note that the definition of "homosexual" applies to hermaphrodites --each has to seek its own kind in order to reproduce, when all of the members of that species are that kind! For them, homosexuality is most definitely a feature, not a bug.

NOW note that hermaphroditic species are ancestral to all species in which the sexes became separated. The associated sexual-preference software (built into DNA) was Evolutionarily updated, but not perfectly, and therefore homosexual activities have been observed in more than 1500 normally-heterosexual species, not just humans. What once was an important feature is now outdated, but is not actually a bug.

(other topics in next message)
 
If you wish to discuss the WW2 and the consequences
That was not the point, hope it did not go that far over your head.

There is no question we have and will go to war when it suits our political need. Whether it is stopping Germany or Japan from starting a world war of Isis threatening our freedom and way of life we will kill if that is the way to stop them. But again that is another thread
And still not the point. Was it really that hard for you to grasp?

I am sorry but abortion terminates a human life.
How you feel about it is irrelevant.

I believe human life needs to be protected at all stages.
But you are OK with killing humans depending on situation. Does hypocrisy mean anything to you?
 
All placental mammals have offspring tied to their mothers during pre-birth development, so the situation isn't quite as unique as you say. And humans aren't the only mammals that typically have one offspring at a time (gorillas, hippos, dolphins, most large herbivores from antelope to zebra). Then there is the additional fact that the "physical tie" between mother and offspring isn't inseparable; the drug RU-486 can force a disconnection to happen, at least in the early part of a pregnancy. That last thing is one of the reasons an unborn human can be compared to a leech or lamprey or certain other parasites (more non-unique-ness, that is).

My point does not limit itself to humans. Prior to the offspring becoming viable, i.e. Able to survive outside of the womb it is wholly dependent upon the genetic mother. Once born, there is no need for the genetic mother for continued survival. Any caregiver can do so. Parasites are not limited to the genetic mother. In fact they tend to move from victim to victim. While some traits of a ZEF can be compared to parasitic traits, there is no real parallel. Pretty much that goes for any kind of comparison we try to do. We can parallel some aspects, but there are others that then break down the comparison. Pregnancy is a unique situation in which the burden (with no good/bad judgement placed upon that burden) is placed solely upon the genetic mother.
 
So this is your explanation of why it is a good idea to extinguish life before birth. It would prevent war. Everyone is entitled to their opinion.
I didn't say abortion was a "good idea"; I merely presented a scenario and a logical consequence. I do find it ridiculous, however, that various people go about spouting the slogan, "Make babies not war!" when excess population has been a fundamental cause of war for tens of thousands of years. "Our tribe has grown and we need more resources, but the neighbors are using those resources. Since our selfish desires are more important than theirs, let us take their resources away from them...."

Hitler was one of the very few political leaders who was almost exactly that blunt about it; see his famous/infamous "lebensraum" speech. If there is just one good thing that can be attributed to Hitler, in my opinion it would be his NON-hypocrisy in blatantly showing the world exactly how overpopulation has given power-mad leaders an excuse to start wars, for tens of thousands of years. Which means that the more-important enemy is overpopulation, not power-mad leaders.

I am informed on the many stages and development of human life from the embryo through old age.
That doesn't mean you know anything at all about the development of human personhood. I recommend starting with a study of the topic of "feral children", followed by thinking about a certain paleontological mystery, followed by this article.

To think that it is OK to terminate the life at one stage verses another is barbaric in my opinion.
But since that opinion is not based on complete information, why should anyone who knows more agree with it? Here is an ANALOGY for you to think about:

It is expected that in the not-distant future there will exist True Artificial Intelligences that will qualify as much as persons as humans qualify as persons. Suppose one of them gets rich and builds a factory to make more of its own kind. Let us imagine that the output of this factory is a small independent machine that is able to seek parts that it can use to upgrade itself. When it leaves the factory its abilities are minimal and its software is hard-coded; it is truly just a machine. But as it follows its programming and upgrades itself by acquiring parts, it becomes a more-capable machine. Among other things, it starts writing software for itself, to extend its capabilities. After it acquires enough parts, it becomes a True Artificial Intelligence, a person.

That analogy is a close parallel to human development. The human brain is a computer that can write software for itself, and the more the brain grows, the more-advanced its software can become. The human body is just a machine, albeit a biological machine. According to YOU, if it is not OK to kill an unborn undeveloped human, it is also not OK to disassemble the machine that leaves the factory in the above paragraph. According to YOU, the machine has as much right to seek parts by stealing them from the body of its True Artificial Intelligent parent, as an unborn human has the right to steal biological resources from its mother's body.

According to pro-choicers, though, both the unborn human and the machine are non-persons having no more rights than rats. Because persons are minds, not bodies. And neither entity will have a person-class mind for quite a while, after it first begins to exist. There is NO such thing as a potentiality that MUST be fulfilled!

[continued in my next message]
 
I am sure in the future we will continue to evolve and will one day protect a person from conception to death. My opinion.
And it is my opinion that education will eventually triumph over ignorance. There is no such thing as "a person" at biological conception! Even a super-advanced computer is NOT a person unless it is running personhood software! Show me a zygote running personhood software, and THEN I might believe your opinion has a basis in rationality.

I think you need to ask some people if they believe human life is significant
FALSE. Opinions and facts are often two different things. The word "significant" needs to be Objectively valid. As an example, consider space dust hitting the Earth. Suppose instead of being spread out over the surface of the Earth, each day's supply arrived in one lump? You won't want to be there when it arrives! That would be an Objectively significant difference!

So, merely asking people's opinions about human significance is not the same thing as gathering Objective data on the subject. There is no doubt that the effects of humanity upon Earth are Objectively significant. That doesn't necessarily mean it is worth bragging about. And if humanity made itself extinct in World War Three, would the Universe care? Not in the slightest! In THAT sense, the existence of humanity is utterly inSignificant! We are as much a cosmic accident as the duck-billed platypus.

and I am sure you will find lots of people who believe as I do.
AGREED. There are lots of folks out there with the same worthless unsupported-by-facts opinions as you!

Then you will have the evidence I already know is out there.
FALSE. Opinions are not facts. Show me some facts.
 
I am sorry but abortion terminates a human life. I believe human life needs to be protected at all stages.
Does that mean you are going to start picketing beauty salons, because the manicures and pedicures performed there routinely kill hundreds of human lives at a time? (See the "cuticle cell argument" linked in an earlier post here.)
 
My point does not limit itself to humans. Prior to the offspring becoming viable, i.e. Able to survive outside of the womb it is wholly dependent upon the genetic mother. Once born, there is no need for the genetic mother for continued survival. Any caregiver can do so. Parasites are not limited to the genetic mother. In fact they tend to move from victim to victim. While some traits of a ZEF can be compared to parasitic traits, there is no real parallel. Pretty much that goes for any kind of comparison we try to do. We can parallel some aspects, but there are others that then break down the comparison. Pregnancy is a unique situation in which the burden (with no good/bad judgement placed upon that burden) is placed solely upon the genetic mother.
My previous message to you focused on your claim of "unique". Human development is NOT unique.

Regarding "dependence", there is even more involved than you pointed out. See the stuff about "active external help" here. I find it quite important that the need for active external help causes certain anti-abortion arguments to suffer from "reductio ad absurdum".

Regarding parasites, it is extremely important to note the distinctions between an actual parasite and an entity that acts like a parasite --it doesn't have to act in all ways like a parasite, for its actions to be declared sufficient for getting killing. Think about the various classic fiction stories about "vampires" --they are fully person-class beings that can be arbitrarily killed (in the stories) for committing just one type of parasitic action (sucking blood from unwilling victims). Meanwhile, actual parasites and unborn humans not only steal resources from their victims, they also dump toxic biowastes into their victims' bodies. For parasites, that entirely suffices to arbitrarily kill them. MORE, unborn humans are even worse still, because they also infuse addictive (progesterone) and mind-altering (oxytocin) substances into the bodies of their victims. If the ONE awful act of fictional vampires suffice for a death sentence, and two suffice for killing parasites, why can't that also be true for unborn humans, especially when accompanied even-more awful actions?

In conclusion of this message, there is no real reason to seek true parallels with other scenarios than pregnancy. We only need enough parallelism to have Objective understanding of the situation, and not be blinded by Stupid Prejudice (there is no such thing as "intelligent prejudice").
 
My previous message to you focused on your claim of "unique". Human development is NOT unique.

Limited on time, so I am only going to address this one point. I hope to get to the rest later when I get some time.

My intent was only on the uniqueness of pregnancy itself, not the uniqueness of human pregnancy. I quite understand that all mammal pregnancy are pretty much the same.

Edit: although with a quick review you seem to have strayed away from the point I was showing and that was what made the difference between pre-birth and post-birth terminations.
 
Your mere say-so is worthless without evidence. Perhaps you should become informed of the "cuticle cell argument" some time.

I wasn't familiar with this argument, so I clicked and landed on page 9 of a 139-page thread, and this page didn't have anything to do with that. Could you direct readers to a page that discusses it please?

My guess from you've posted here on this page is that this is like the silly "lives being lost through masturbation" thing. I say "silly" because, unlike a zygote, and sperm or cuticle cell isn't a complete organism.
 
I wasn't familiar with this argument, so I clicked and landed on page 9 of a 139-page thread, and this page didn't have anything to do with that. Could you direct readers to a page that discusses it please?

My guess from you've posted here on this page is that this is like the silly "lives being lost through masturbation" thing. I say "silly" because, unlike a zygote, and sperm or cuticle cell isn't a complete organism.

I found a reference to a cuticle argument in post #191 of that thread.
I copied and pasted it for you since you could not seem to find it.

A living cuticle cell is not a fingernail, nor is it a hair (and aren't those made of dead cells?). **I** say the cuticle cell is as much "a human" as a zygote, based on Objectively verifiable data showing that they are trivially different from each other. Keeping in mind that most types of specialized cells descended from a single zygote and have ALL the DNA of that zygote, here (from #42):

For a cuticle cell, its "normal DNA code" is the code that tells it how to act like a cuticle cell. Stimulating it with the computer-code equivalent of a GOTO instruction could make it start processing zygote code. See why I say the two cells are trivially different?

As an analogy, consider this Web Page, which includes editing features. The overall page is a bit different when you start editing something, but note the browser didn't do a full-page-reload, to do that editing. The editing code was there all along, and is invoke-able. Likewise, the zygote code in a cuticle cell is there all along, and stem-cell researchers are merely trying to figure out how to invoke it. Thus the cuticle cell is as much "a human" as a zygote.

There are a couple of big/obvious physical differences between a zygote and a cuticle cell, but they don't matter at all. The zygote is stuffed with food, courtesy of the ovum, and is locked inside a shell, the "zona pallucida". It cannot acquire resources from the outside, but it doesn't need to. The cuticle cell doesn't have the shell or the food, but can acquire resources from the outside (look up "growing meat in a Petri dish").
 
T

But you are OK with killing humans depending on situation. Does hypocrisy mean anything to you?

Exactly. Their personal justification or judgement.
 
Limited on time, so I am only going to address this one point. I hope to get to the rest later when I get some time.
My intent was only on the uniqueness of pregnancy itself, not the uniqueness of human pregnancy. I quite understand that all mammal pregnancy are pretty much the same.
Edit: although with a quick review you seem to have strayed away from the point I was showing and that was what made the difference between pre-birth and post-birth terminations.
My goal was basically to show that "unique" was not the best word choice. "Different" is a far better word choice --unborn humans are VERY different from born humans, even just before a normal full-term birth. Here is some of the evidence for that!
 
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I found a reference to a cuticle argument in post #191 of that thread.
I copied and pasted it for you since you could not seem to find it.
That's only part of the overall cuticle-cell argument. Much more of it can be found here (and possibly in some posts that are linked as quotes there). I suspect I will need to consolidate all of it in one place sometime. Please note that this argument is not a pro-choice argument; it is a destruction of various anti-abortion arguments (via "reductio ad absurdum"). It sort-of exists in 3 significantly different areas of the "Full Abortion Debate Argument" that can be found here (search for the word "cuticle").
 
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I wasn't familiar with this argument, so I clicked and landed on page 9 of a 139-page thread, and this page didn't have anything to do with that. Could you direct readers to a page that discusses it please?

My guess from you've posted here on this page is that this is like the silly "lives being lost through masturbation" thing. I say "silly" because, unlike a zygote, and sperm or cuticle cell isn't a complete organism.
You should have reached Msg #1063 of that Thread. It features more of the conclusion of the cuticle-cell argument, than its setup. minnie616 found a significant part of the setup, for the argument. Please also see my reply here (#72) to her Msg #69.

Also, here is something mentioned in what minnie616 quoted (regarding a "from #42"), but wasn't included in her Msg #69:
Therefore the simple phrase "a human" suffices to be used when talking about some entity that is associated with membership in the H.Sapiens species. A brain-dead adult most certainly be called "a human". A single isolated cuticle cell can also be called "a human" (remember that stem-cell researchers are trying to discover how to make a specialized cell start processing zygote DNA code instead of its normal DNA code, because the zygote is a stem cell; remember that an ordinary virus can easily make a cell stop processing its normal DNA code, and start processing viral DNA code; remember that "cloning" researchers have been able to get the zygote code processed, that was originally located in a specialized cell's DNA.)
 
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I wasn't familiar with this argument, so I clicked and landed on page 9 of a 139-page thread, and this page didn't have anything to do with that. Could you direct readers to a page that discusses it please?

My guess from you've posted here on this page is that this is like the silly "lives being lost through masturbation" thing. I say "silly" because, unlike a zygote, and sperm or cuticle cell isn't a complete organism.
Neither is a zygote.
 
Neither is a zygote.
A zygote is a complete single-celled organism of the "eukaryote" variety. Every single living cell (that has full DNA) in any multicelled animal body is also a complete organism of the eukaryote variety. The main difference between those cells and ordinary eukaryotes (like amoebas and parameciums) is that they are evolved to work well with others; they TEND to symbiotically work together to create and maintain an environment in which their needs are met. But each one of them CAN live independently of the others; that's why it is possible to grow meat in a Petri dish.
 
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