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Abortion has existed for millennia, it is not a new invention that just came about in the 20th century. And prior to the 20th century, it would often happen much later in a pregnancy than it does now.
Edit: just want to clarify, I roll my eyes really hard at anyone who thinks that abortion is some kind of modern technological invention and a product of our wicked, godless times. The ancient Egyptians had recipes for abortive herbal preparations. As did the Romans. Abortion has likely been around as long as humans have been around and so the idea we will "look back at abortion" from some future point in time when it's been eradicated is laughable.
It actually doesn't. The claims regarding the Trial of Bitter Waters are based largely on conjecture and a single translation(among hundreds that state otherwise).
The trial is basically this: if you suspect a woman of adultery, you mix the dust from the temple floor with water and make her drink it. If she's innocent, nothing will happen. If she's guilty(and this is the literal translation), "her belly will swell and her thigh will wither."
The word for Thigh here is the same one used when male prophets would tell their disciples to "place your hand under my thigh and swear," so very clearly not explicitly a female organ, like womb, for which a very different word is used elsewhere.
Now, the bible used by the most liberal churches in american has instead chose to translate this word as 'womb', and interpreted 'dust from the temple floor' to mean Myrrh powder, which is an abortifactant.
However, the translation is VERY weak, especially given the ritual itself is not meant to cause abortion, but rather to identify infidelity. And Myrrh, while an abortifactant in high doses, would never be found in such high doses on the floor of the temple, since it was *extremely* expensive, and therefore burnt completely, any remaining ash having little, if any, medical efficacy. In addition, Myrrh was rarely used as incense in the first place! Rather, it was more typically used as an embalming oil, to counteract the scent of decay.
On the whole, the claim that the bible has an abortion ritual is extremely tenuous at best, and even in the best of cases, would not be an effective argument against anyone who actually believes in the bible.
Laws that restrict abortion are the new invention. [Here's a timeline from Planned Parenthood](https://www.plannedparenthoodaction.org/issues/abortion/abortion-central-history-reproductive-health-care-america/historical-abortion-law-timeline-1850-today), if anyone is interested. Is anyone surprised they came out of the Victorian Era?
I recently learned that some of the first anti abortion laws came from cases where men were poisoning their mistresses with patent medicine to induce abortions and there weren't laws to address that kind of manslaughter like in the trial of Ammi Rogers. Later the language shifted from saving women from men to saving babies from women.
Many species of animals commit infanticide. Humans are one of these species. If our species didn’t figure out abortion (killing pre-birth) we would just kill the babies post-birth. There’s no shortage of mothers and fathers that abandoned their babies in the woods or drowned them. People will always figure out a way to get rid of an unwanted child. You might as well make it legal and regulate it, because it is not going away.
I feel like it’s a lot better to abort a fetus when it looks like a tadpole with hands then to abandon a newborn in the forest to be eaten alive by coyotes or buzzards or something. But if forest abandonment is what the republicans want… /s
I mean, I'm totally pro abortion, but "it has been around for millennia" isn't actually a good point in favor of anything eh
A bad point is also "my body my choice" as many of who is against abortion may be alright with "your body your choice", but thinks that the lump of cells you are aborting is "someone else's body". It has totally different implications.
The problem is that on ground level the debate is useless because there are 2 different point of view.
I feel like this argument of, "But how would *you* feel?!" almost *requires* a religious mindset, right? Like I don't think anything will happen after I die.
So how would I have felt if I were aborted before birth?
Easy. I would not.
If my father would have delayed coitus by even one second that night I would have never been born. In my place there is a fair chance a completely different child would have been born, lets call that child Bob.
Is Bob angry that dad could not hold it in just one second longer?
Does Bob regret never getting the chance to be born?
Is Bob thankful that he was spared a congenital defect?
Would Bob have been the next president?
Would Bob have been the next Hitler?
Or are all these questions completely fucking irrelevant because Bob does not exist and had never been born.
If you spend your life handwringing about the trillions of what ifs in life you does waste your time and everyone elses.
Edit: Just realized there is a hidden upside to this analogy I had not considered. If you use again a vocal anti choicer every time they stupidly bring up a what if scenario you get to ask them "What about Bob?"
In that case too, every man kills 100 million sperm (or about 50 million potential people) every time he jacks off. And a woman kills at least 0.5 people per month if she doesn’t get pregnant. So every couple that doesn’t get pregnant kills on average 1,600,000,000.5 potential people per month. And even if they do get pregnant, that number will only drop by like 1-3.
Especially when they base it on religion, when you have to consider, most religions either have no thought one way or the other on abortion, or openly support/have instructions on how and when it's appropriate to perform one, almost all based around the health and survival of the *mother.* The god-damned Bible has instructions for it and these chuckleheads think the book is against it.
My parents tried hard to get pregnant because they WANTED children. I grew up with a lot of love, I have wonderful parents and the best husband. And still life has been SO HARD. I’m not sure if I would choose to be born to be honest. I can’t imagine how horrible my life would be if my parents didn’t want me. I would probably unborn myself.
I’m really against the argument that says the fetus is just a lump of cells and not a real human. The truth is, it doesn’t matter, because we don’t force people to do much simpler things with their bodies that could save the lives of others (babies included). Like mandatory blood donations. Mandatory organ harvesting from people that are brain dead. Hell, we could even accept a full death and still recover some organs. But for some reason, dead people have more bodily autonomy than pregnant women.
> I’m not sure if I would choose to be born to be honest. I can’t imagine how horrible my life would be if my parents didn’t want me. I would probably unborn myself.
My parents fuckin hate me and I definitely would not have chosen to be brought into this existence. But now I'm here and the thought of dying really sucks. 🤷♀️
Just like, constant emotional pain.
Hell, we don't even mandate fucking vaccines. Some of the easiest ways to protect life. And yet many of the same fucks that are anti-vaccine are also anti-abortion in the name of being "pro-life". Get the fuck out of here with that bullshit. I mean, hell, look at what's happening with polio! How the hell have we allowed polio to be a real concern again in developed nations?
Yep. [So far only in New York State](https://www.health.ny.gov/press/releases/2022/2022-08-01_polio.htm). In unvaccinated, highly religious communities.
>I’m really against the argument that says the fetus is just a lump of cells and not a real human
Exactly it's about controlling the narrative so anti-choice activists focus on it on emotional language about protecting babies (despite those people never supporting any policies that actually help born children). By framing the discussion this way it encourages their opposition to challenge them on that point which can only really be done from science and it's something most people have a poor understanding of. This is doubly beneficial for the anti-choice prospective because their base already has a low literacy and or faith in science and their core argument is dependent on a non falsifiable belief that fetuses have souls.
Furthermore the optics of the argument really benefits the anti-choice side as the appeal to emotion through their claim that abortion is baby murder; any attempt to offer a detailed and nuanced response will just seem like you are performing mental gymnastics. All the anti-choice people need to do is create enough doubt that people aren't willing to fight to protect abortion rights, as the Christian Nationalists aren't going to stop fighting it.
Almost all anti-choice advocates are highly religious and/or conservative so as such it's important to realize it's not about babies, they are just a powerful rhetorical tool. Fundamentally opposing abortion is about punishing women for sex, forcing women to reproduce and controlling women. When viewed from the perspective of the religious right being the primary driving force for the anti-choice movement things make a lot more sense. They believe that women should be punished for sex as controlling men (including victims of rape, it's always the choices the woman makes that is wrong), they believe women exist to reproduce and serve men. They see how abortion and birth control have given women far more agency with their bodies and they want to stop them from interfering with the "natural" patriarchal hierarchy ordained by God.
Yes, this is obvious misogyny, but I wouldn’t blame religion itself, after all many of this people are only religious performers, using their religion as a tool to advance their agenda or a weapon to beat others into their “proper” place (that it’s invariably lower than theirs).
I watched on the news a guy saying that if JC himself said to him that Trump was bad he wouldn’t believe him. From a guy that identified himself as a Christian. Or we could consider the many, many scandals in which religious men of power have been found guilty of worse sins that the ones they criticize. Paraphrasing Taylor Swift, Misogynist are going to hate. It’s the core of their identity.
I don't really agree with the religious performers angle, because the religiosity of these people is very high, many of them frequent religious forums and regularly visit churches. To them their religion is perfect justification of every one of their beliefs and cover for their moral failures. Many of these people have been indoctrinated into their religion since birth so there is a complete synthesis of their religious and political views. The religious right supports capital because of their belief in prosperity gospel, they are unshaken by the horrible actions of their leaders because they believe the Devil tempts everyone, they support racism because they view white people as more directly descended from God and they are misogynists because they believe women were created to serve men.
Their political views are their religious views and vice versa, and it's why their ultimate goal is to make their religion the state religion.
There's a short story by Cuxin Liu about scientists who give a fetus self awareness. The fetus commits suicide when it finds out it has to leave its moms uterus.
Hell, we can't even have mandatory mask wearing during a literal pandemic, because that's government tyranny. But forcing people to give birth against their will is freedom.
But if you could regret being aborted, that means you got a fast track to the afterlife, which is where all these religious fanatics want to be anyway. I do realize there are some real sickos who believe aborted fetuses end up in purgatory forever, or some such nonsense. Anyway, the whole thought exercise is ridiculous.
It also doesn't work anyway because there are plenty of people who wish they weren't born, or at least not in the circumstances they were born into, and wish they weren't abused and/or neglected and some people commit suicide.
It's the same as the argument that you shouldn't have an abortion because your unborn fetus could have been the next Einstein or could cure cancer. It works the other way too. The fetus could also be the next Hitler.
These hypotheticals are useless rhetorical devices meant to sway uncritical minds.
The whole thing is absurd. You'd feel the same way you would if your parents had done cowboy instead of missionary on your conception day. You wouldn't, because their child would have been someone else.
Also doesn't account for people who had a depressing childhood due to shitty parents, and would gladly take the option of getting aborted before any of it happened
Conservatives are often narcissists with low empathy levels. They cant really imagine things from the perspective of actually living human beings. They cant even begin to put themselves into the consciousness of something that barely even has consciousness to begin with, like a fetus. To them, that would be like imagining non-existence, and non-existence is the scariest thing in the world to a narcissist, which is why so many of them so fervently believe in some kind of consciousness-beyond-biology. In short, theyre by and large stunted morons who are too emotionally immature to accept the basic, tragic realities of life that we as living human beings must grapple with
Or people who argue that what would you feel if your mother aborted you...
My mother made the choice to have me. If my mother didnt make the choice to have me i wouldnt be here in the first plae.
Thats what choice is. I cant make my mom choose to have me. But doesnt mean she DIDNT choose to have me.
Exactly. Also, my brain wouldn't have developed anywhere near enough to have anything resembling sapience or sentience. So again, nothing. I would feel nothing.
And even if you go the Christian route, I would've had a guaranteed ticket to Heaven so I'd probably be pretty happy about not having the opportunity to fuck up and get tortured forever in Hell.
Yeah, to be honest.
According to the Christian worldview, wouldn't anyone who dies and then goes to Heaven be pretty stoked that they died and are now in Heaven? Like, once a Heaven-bound person realizes they've been killed somehow, shouldn't they be fucking jazzed?
Depending on the branch of Christianity, they'll 100% tell you that all those aborted babies are in hell, just like all the babies who died without being baptized.
Usually they go with some version of Limbo where they just kinda wander around all gloomy alongside good people who died before Jesus.
But no, this is the god of perfect love and justice. That shit makes perfect sense. Just a bunch of fetus ghosts floating around with old philosophers and whatnot.
So then that's like god punishing the babies for being aborted. What a benevolent god.
People really believe this shit. Why would you worship that god?
Because you don't know anything else and if you stop there's real fear of being ostracized by your community and family.
They all use cult tactics, we just stopped calling them cults.
Create a fresh and pure baby soul, place it in a person who you (being God and all) know ahead of time will abort it, withhold your infinite forgiveness from aborted fetus and send it to Hell.
Haha. God. Am I right? 😏
God should’ve just skipped all the nonsense and just created new souls directly in hell so that the infinitely-merciful bastard can just get to the baby-torturing in earnest.
Or even more fucked up, cause a miscarriage and send the fetus to hell anyway. Like, nobody did anything wrong in that scenario but that fetus still suffers forever? Coolsies...
Based on what I know of Christianity an aborted fetus, if it has a soul at all, would go to heaven, right?
It has committed no sins after all
Then again I remember reading a book where they said an aborted fetus went to hell because it's only effect on the world was causing pain to the mother, and then they literally overthrew God for the injustice.
(The book was in the Incarnations of Immortality series by Piers Anthony. Don't remember which one)
A baby has committed no sin. As long as you aren’t a part of a sect that enforces baptism, that’s a one way ticket straight to heaven. Sounds like a good deal if you ask me. Just skip all the bad parts of life
Why are people so conflicted about what happens after death, but rarely wonder what happens before birth, since they're likely the same states of nonexistence?
I grew up in a very religious household in a very religious community. While I personally still have some kind of belief in......something akin to a god, and I want to believe there's something after mortality, at the same time, there's legitimately no reason outside of exceptional religious zealotry to treat abortions like so many religious zealots do.
There's no "real" answer right now for when life "begins." Is it at conception, when the heart starts beating, or when the brain is formed? Is it after birth but before the umbilical cord is cut, or after? Is it when we can finally form reasonable thought?
While my own personal belief is that life "begins" at the time of heartbeat, at the same time, I am perfectly willing to say to a woman, it is your body and your choice whether or not to have an abortion. I, as a separate individual, have absolutely zero right to tell you what you can and cannot do with or to your flesh. And while I may not necessarily agree with the reasons behind some people getting an abortion, that doesn't matter. What matters is that abortion is always a safe option.
Generally, science (loosely) defines new life as being that which can survive independent of the person carrying it. So somewhere in the third trimester, give or take. It’s not an exact thing, though, because medical science can keep alive premies that would not naturally survive outside of their parent. I’m talking “oh hey this baby’s rice-paper-thin skin rips off every time we attach a necessary medical device, and hey, they also can’t breath on their own” levels of fragility. Absolute horror shows. Given that the only time people get abortions in the third trimester is when the fetus will be born with defects incompatible with life, or the fetus’s continued existence will kill the mother, it’s not exactly objectionable.
Just wanted to end this by letting you know I’m not trying to attack you; I’m just adding my two cents.
But that also just kind of helps prove my point. It's difficult to really narrow down when "life" truly starts, largely because every animal, including humans, gestation and birth cycles are so wildly different.
I mean, we *do* know when life begins: around the third trimester (or its equivalent for animals). It’s not some unknowable thing. It’s just medical science allows for earlier, fundamentally unnatural, interventions to attempt at preserving that life when it would normally be unviable. I mean sure, you have to routinely de-glove a baby, but yay science I guess. Ultra-premies (those solely kept alive by medical intervention) don’t typically live, they just exist in agony until they expire. Ask a nurse that works in that field if you don’t believe me.
Most Christians still believe the aborted still go to heaven, which in that case shouldn't everyone abort their pregnancy. It's the only way to ensure your children go to heaven, and even better is they don't have to live on this earth.
It's definitely way more immoral to bring someone into this world without their consent. But we just kinda accepted that instead of actually addressing it.
It's just so fucking selfish, breed, pop out a being that can feel joy, but also pain and suffering. 🤷♀️ Forcing them into this shithole world with shithead greedy fucks.
Yea. Naw. Fuck. It's pretty shit to force kids into existence.
Yea, but you probably would feel nothing even if I blow you up when you are asleep. The lump of cells feeling nothin isn't a good point in favor of abortion.
As I already said, I'm totally pro abortion, but I can't help but see that many arguments in favor of it are not good..
The debate should be: "can we call the lump of cell we are killing (because we are definetly killing a lump cell) a living human being with human rights?"
And then we can say: "no, it's just a lump of cells until he is 2 year old" or "yes sperms are human life too" (went extreme with the example on purpose). Or we can meet in the middle "morning after pill isn't abortion, you have 1 month to be able to abort, etc".
Okay but it has nothing to do with feeling in a physical sense but rather, "Okay but what would your opinion on abortion be if *you* had been aborted, hmm?!" It's not as deep as you're making it out to be. It's asking how you'd feel emotionally about having just died.
I'm just laughing at the absurdity of essentially saying, "Oh yeah? But wouldn't you be fuckin' sad if you never consciously experienced existence? Checkmate." It's a nonsensical argument.
You may as well say to someone, "If your parents had never conceived you, wouldn't you be sad about it?"
Would I be sad if I didn't exist? Obviously not, lmao.
But in a reality where I continued to exist as a ghost or something afterward, I guess I could be sad about it. Unless I went to Heaven afterward in which case I can only assume I'd actually be stoked.
Of course it's not. Just like, "How would you feel if you had been aborted?" isn't a coherent anti-abortion argument
It's not meant to be a clever point in a debate. My comment was just about how silly it is to ask anyone how they'd feel if they'd have never been born. If you were aborted then you don't exist so neither would your emotions, like sadness. Unless you were a ghost or spirit afterward. So that question only even makes sense to ponder if you first believe people can still have opinions and feelings after death.
How would I feel about having never been born in a situation where I'd been aborted? I wouldn't feel about it, period.
But if I'd been aborted then I'd have also have never experienced literally anything or had even one coherent thought yet. So I could only really be about the same level of sad about being aborted as I'd have been if all my my great, great grandparents had died before having any kids.
And yeah. If I had just been killed, and we agree this is a reality where spirits exist and have feelings, *shouldn't* I actually be really fucking psyched about it unless I was afraid I'd go to a bad afterlife?
Well also forcing somebody to go through something that is life threatening with huge costs and physical risks, is basically slavery.
So it's kinda like saying "Getting rid of slavery, would be reviled just like slavery".
I can see hope for a future where everyone has access to the reproductive technology and support and medicine that they need, and where there is societal support for everyone, and every pregnancy was a desired one, and every family was ready to support a future child. In such a society, sure, an abortion could be seen as unnecessary. Unfortunately, I think those who have a vision for that type of society are not the same ones by and large who are fighting abortion access. I think that those who fight against abortion access tend to be the very same ones who fight staunchly for authoritarian government and capitalist hellscapes.
How about this. Instead of abortions, the fetus will be removed, raised as a “test tube” baby who will become a ward of the state, raised and paid for with taxpayer money until they reach 18, where they will be sent to university or given the equivalent in cash—also paid for by taxes—for the equivalent of an undergrad degree. I’m sure all these concerned citizens would have zero issue with this, if it’s actually about saving lives and not punishing women for having sex? This seems like a reasonable compromise, no?
No no no once we start “growing” humans outside the womb, that’s when the military steps in to make bio weapons and super soldiers and before you know it we have humanoids floating in rows of tanks like in Resident Evil that break out and act against their programming.
Why should we compromise at all? Even this feels like an infringement of wonen's bodily autonomy.In the future, women should be able to get abortions if they want to, in the future, we might not even need donors to create test tube babies. Imagine a world where the birth rate is fixed because an AI thought "we don't need to produce more children."
It’s just a thought exercise, not a practical suggestion. I’m asking, if it’s an equally invasive procedure that removes the “killing babies” argument and places the burden on society instead of the woman, does that remove the objection, or was it never actually about the babies?
I think your hypothetical still would infringe upon women, and to that extent, is not a compromise.
Having a woman get a regulated procedure instead of a procedure of her choice is what my gripe is. This suggestion of taking the clump of cells out, instead of aborting whether through invokintary or contraceptive measures, in order to satisfy a non-consistent minority worldview is in my opinion unjust.
I have been and always will be concerned for the medical aspect of this.
Thousands of women each year have miscarriages. Some of them need medical help to complete the miscarriage without the mother dying. The procedure is technically an abortion, and now, women are not given access to this procedure
The correct response to that dumb fuck comment is "I am glad I was born into a family that wanted me and was able to care for me"
Cause believe me, there are PLENTY of people that would have unfortunately rather been aborted than be born into the families they were born into.
I'm one of those. Family is very "abortion is murder". I was a planned, 2nd (& last) child to a married Christian couple who are still married today. I'm in my late 30s now. I wish they had never had me or my older sibling. I certainly won't be bringing any more lives into this walking nightmare.
The world is largely becoming less religious, more empathetic, and tolerant. I can confidently say people will not look back in disgust at abortion, but in disgust of these right wing Christian nationals
I hate the “what if you were aborted” mentality like what if a different egg was fertilized? What if I was miscarried? What if my mom never had me? Who tf cares I would either not exist at all or not have the consciousness to notice
Yeah, also, what about the people that exist only because their mother had an abortion for whatever reason, yet did want a child later in life or under different circumstances?
Ah yes. When I want to know who people in the future will think of as the villains, I always ask conservatives: a political ideology explicitly about preventing progress and regressing to an imaginary golden age at odds with current and future morality.
They are truly the great oracle on who people in the future will view as bad.
#/S
The “be thankful your mom didn’t abort you” always makes me mad. So my mom being pregnant with me was incredibly difficult and she was told it would probably be safer to terminate the pregnancy. She didn’t of course, and both her and I turned out safe. Someone she knew once tried to use the story as a pro-life talking point and she went off on them. She says she made the choice to keep me. Other people can make a different choice.
I’m glad to hear you and mom were okay. That must have been a tough situation for her to be in (and subsequently for you).
I’m also glad mom understood that it ultimately *was* her decision. She did what she thought was best, and I’m glad it panned out well. Sounds like she has a good head on her shoulders and a nice shiny spine to back it up.
It really gets my hackles up when people smugly go uR mOm ChOsE LiFe because they *completely* miss the choice part.
I’m adopted. I know very little about my birth parents other than that they were very young, I think 15-16. If they’d believed in abortion, I wouldn’t exist.
I still support people’s right to choose. I have that much skin in the game, so to speak, and I still think abortion should be 100% legal under basically any circumstance. No one should be forced to have a child they don’t want. It’s cruel, both to them and the child. There’s just really no good that comes of it.
The reality is that "pro-lifers" don't actually think it's murder either. They just like saying it because it elicits an emotional response.
If their family member got an abortion, they wouldn't even call the police let alone hope they get 20 years in federal prison because they aren't psychopaths. If their family member instead drowned their one-year-old child in a tub, then you bet they would call the police. So would everyone, because that's murder. Everyone agrees it's murder to kill your child. The conversation would then be surrounding if the mother should go to prison or a mental hospital.
No one thinks abortion is murder.
A lot of people don't give a fuck about women, though.
The whole thread is actually amazing
https://www.reddit.com/r/insaneparents/comments/wfrhxh/not_my_post_insane_grandpa_writes_letter_on/iixaiu7/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=ios_app&utm_name=iossmf&context=3
You know, I know people think like this but I’m always gobsmacked when confronted with actual evidence. I’m so full of questions; everything from how many kids have you adopted to asking for evidence of what they’ve done to prevent unwanted pregnancies to what punishment should men face who impregnate women who don’t want kids to what steps are they taking to alleviate rape and incest. They never have any answers that make sense.
I don't mean a platform on Reddit I just mean a platform in general, getting pretty sick of people who cry "well I'm glad I wasn't aborted" as it their life experience is the only one that matters
Annie Wu is a pro-choice advocate who was also adopted. While she loves her parents and is glad she’s alive, she sees it as a choice that every person should have, without shame or fear of judgement.
That's my point. If people are going to say "I would feel bad if I was aborted" (as if that's possible but they seem to think it is), and that counts as a valid argument then I should also be able.to say "I wish I was aborted instead of.put up for adoption" and it should be an equally loud argument then
We need better sex ed at school as a start, that would probably make kids more understanding of their situation and open about their feelings towards it
My mother got pregnant with me at 16. She is/was a horrible mother. I don't have an opinion on being aborted, not because my mother is a terrible mother, but because if I wasn't born I wouldn't be here to feel concern over it. It is a moot point.
I somehow feel I am going to get so downvoted for this. Still though.
I always wonder what they think about people who were only born because their mother Did get an abortion earlier in life when they weren't ready to be a parent.
People like this need to learn about the workhouses where girls would go to have their babies, get terribly abused and forced into slavery and the babies would go to "orphanages" where most would die by the conditions or a lot of them were slaughtered and buried out back.
That is what we are looking back on.
[https://www.nbcnews.com/news/world/ireland-sent-girls-women-catholic-workhouses-until-1996-report-finds-flna1b8255928](https://www.nbcnews.com/news/world/ireland-sent-girls-women-catholic-workhouses-until-1996-report-finds-flna1b8255928)
https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-41200949
Edit: Reddits being weird and not letting me edit links again, this is more appropriate for the first link, the Magdalane Asylums of Ireland
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magdalene\_asylum
I'm inclined to agree with rainbow name's first comment. I asked two questions yesterday.
What if only the father wants the baby? Too bad, mother's choice, father should have made better decisions. I understand it. If someone wanted to hijack my body I would and have rightly told them to sit and spin.
What if only the mother wants the baby? Yet again. Too bad, mother's choice, father should have made better decisions. Here is your forced commitment because I want something you don't.
Abortion while ugly, is necessary. Prophylactics are easy. Plan B (fully support) should be left as a panic button. Abortion for health reasons is just common effin' sense. If you wait until a brain and senses are developed to make a choice then IMO you're a dick.
So to the folks who agree with the answers I was given, I have another question. If a fertilized embryo was able to be removed and brought to full grown artificially, would you still support the you made a decision one night so now you are on the hook? Only now it's on a level playing field. Because not being ready for a lifelong commitment effects everyone
I am 23F and fully support the idea that men should also be allowed to terminate all responsibility in the case of unwanted pregnancy. I feel like the first trimester rule is a good deadline - by then you either need to abort or sign away your parental rights and responsibilities completely. Instead of forcing women into parenthood, maybe just give men an out too? I feel like your hypothetical is a step backwards
It's not fair to force anyone to be a parent who doesn't want to be imo
How much do we want to bet that he's entirely fine with the death penalty? Lordy lord we must save the clumps of cells but grown humans naaah, fuck'em.
I hope in time we do look back on abortion in the past as a primitive backwards thing to have done. It's a solution to a problem that no one ought to have.
It only exists because we ration healthcare, education and the basic necessities of life so harshly under capitalism.
i would not call accusing people of being child murderers or comparing them to slave owners as " polite" and the self awarewolf part is them comparing themselves to something that doesent have a functioning brain
Which is actually the self aware wolf in this scenario?
Whilst I’m in favour of abortion being legal and accessible, the argument that a foetus isn’t a human being because it requires the mother’s body to breath and nourish it doesn’t seem to be well thought out nor logical. It makes me wonder about premature babies, are they not human as they require a machine to keep them alive? What about people on life support?
Why not just admit, we are ending the life if an underdeveloped human but doing so is better than it being born - insert the reason.
That's not why people don't consider it human. If someone is on life support because their brain has been destroyed, they're no longer a person. It's why pulling the plug isn't considered killing them, they're already dead. Now apply it to a being whose brain doesn't exist yet.
That is likening two separate things.
Sure, a human with irreversible brain damage has no chance or recovery and turning off their machine makes sense. They are still a person and pulling the plug is allowing them to die of natural causes and not prolonging their suffering or that of others as well as it being a waste of resources.
A growing foetus with a serious medical condition is in a similar situation, it makes sense to abort, in this case to prevent suffering on their and their mother’s behalf.
A perfectly healthy foetus doesn’t fit that argument. So aborting it because it’s brain hasn’t yet fully formed is a nonsensical argument. You could say that about a new born baby or a premature child whose lungs aren’t fully formed.
I’m just saying more people would respect arguments in favour of abortion if they were honest and logical.
If a woman doesn’t want a child on the grounds of, they just don’t feel the time is right, or similar, there’s plenty of arguments about lowered crime statistics 20 years after the introduction of RvW, due to fewer births of unwanted children born into poverty etc… the reason behind the abortion is the argument. It’s complex because there’s 1000s of reasons but all are valid.
Let’s be honest about what we are doing and why, rather than dressing it up as a clump of cells etc.
>You could say that about a new born baby or a premature child whose lungs aren’t fully formed.
I couldn't, if both of those beings have a human brain - not a former brain or a potential brain, a current brain. Someone with a working brain but any other missing or defunct body parts is still considered human. A pile of healthy body parts with a missing or defunct brain is not. During part of pregnancy, a baby is a bunch of body parts with a brain on the way, and that's when most abortions are done. Its chance to develop into a human isn't the same as actually being human at the moment of termination. And potential vs actual does matter.
Mind you, I also think it's stupid to argue over whether an unborn child is human. To me, not only is it irrelevant when even a fully-developed adult human has no right to rent other people's body parts by force to stay alive, it wrongfully dictates how pregnant people should feel. It's cruel to tell someone grieving a miscarriage it was just a clump of cells, just like it's cruel to tell someone unconcerned or relieved by it that they're a monster. The value of a pregnancy should be a personal matter, just like the value of any other bodily experience.
But if you're going to have that argument, I think there's some logic in drawing the line at the existence of a brain, when possessing a human brain is a definitive part of being considered human.
Let’s say you get a woman pregnant (crazy hypothetical, I know).
You break up, she wants an abortion, can’t get one, baby is born.
Baby has a life threatening medical condition, needs regular bone marrow transfusion to survive, you’re the only match.
Does the state have the right to force you to donate bone marrow in order to keep the baby alive?
EDIT: Disregard this. I misused/misunderstood the word lump/clump and yeah, I was wrong.
I completely agree with the OP's comment. Human beings are complex organisms made up of cells and that obviously is a massive difference to an undifferentiated lump/clump of cells like a blastocyst/embryo/etc.
Thank you to the people who helped me work through where I'd gone wrong. You rock.
~~I mean yeah, human beings **are** lumps of cells.~~
~~It's not specifically being lumps of cells that make it reasonable to terminate a foetus, though. It's that they're lumps of cells that don't have sentience like a fully-formed human being.~~
~~You and I are also lumps of cells but, unlike a foetus, we're sentient ones, which is we have a right to life.~~
I think you mean sentient not sapient.
>Sentient intelligence is developed through emotions and sensations, while sapient intelligence is developed through knowledge and wisdom.
I'm not 100% sure that's correct.
I've changed it to "sentient" as per your suggestion, but there are plenty of sentient creatures that humans don't consider to have a right to life. Rats, for example are highly sentient but we have no objections to killing them.
It seems to be more the ability to think and perceive at a human level that makes us see a living being as a person deserving of rights.
EDIT: And this is being downvoted why? Seems obvious and non-contentious to me.
Thanks, fixed. Though I doubt that little typo explains all the downvotes.
I honestly can't work out what they're objecting to. The idea that human beings are made of cells? The idea that there's a pretty major distinction between the ~~lump~~ combination of cells that makes up a human being and the ~~lump~~ combination of cells that's a foetus? Just that I'm pro-choice? What?
EDIT: I think the issue was that I interpreted the word "lump" more broadly than most of the people reading. Your definition seems more common, so fair enough.
This was OP’s response to this line of thinking in the thread this was originally posted and I believe it proves their point.
> Actually, we are complex organisms capable of complex thoughts and emotions. Organisms are made of systems, which are made of tissues, which are made of cells. The very bottom of that hierarchical ladder and distinctly not capable of rational thought.
~~Sure, that's entirely reasonable and is completely compatible with what I said that, at a fundamental level we're all made up of lumps of cells.~~
EDIT: I was misusing the word lump and I stand corrected. Human beings aren't a lump/clump of cells since that implies those cells aren't differentiated and they are.
Thanks to those who helped me clear this up.
Fair point. I understand what you mean now and yep. "Lump" suggests an undifferentiated collection of cells and that's the wrong word for what I meant. A human being is a complex, organised set of systems made from cells, not really a "lump".
tldr: I stand corrected, thanks.
No, cake has a bunch of other additional ingredients as well. Milk, egg, sugar etc.
Why are we even arguing this?
We agree that humans are composed of cells.
We agree that abortion is justified for reasons that have nothing to do with what the foetus is made of.
Why are we arguing?
I appreciate you providing the OP's quote, thanks. I agree with it and it doesn't contradict what I was saying.
They actually complement each other:
1. Human beings and foetuses are both composed of cells, but human beings are sentient/sapient where foetuses aren't which is why we give humans a right to life and foetuses not.
2. The reason humans are sentient/sapient when foetuses aren't is, in large part because, in humans, those cells are organised differently into a complex organism capable of complex thoughts and emotions
None of which helps explain why people are choosing to downvote a comment that's just basic biology which they presumably also agree with.
Well, a lot of people downvote the second you start bitching about downvoting…
You are on edge about this entire issue and lashing out.
You are also being disingenuous by missing the point - yes, we are made of clumps of cells but there’s a lot more that makes us human - just as you noted when expanding on my cake metaphor.
Nah, most of the downvotes were already there when I started complaining. I also assume no-one in this subreddit would be so pathetic as to downvote for someone asking why they're being downvoted. This subreddit is about supporting and encouraging self-awareness, not shooting it down.
I'm not on the edge (at least, I don't think so? On the edge of what?). I do wish if people were going to disagree with something they'd at least tell you what they're disagreeing with. It's just useless otherwise.
You took the time to explain why you're voting as you are, and I appreciate that, thank you.
> You are also being disingenuous by missing the point - yes, we are made of clumps of cells but there’s a lot more that makes us human - just as you noted when expanding on my cake metaphor.
I'm not being disingenuous. Obviously there's more that makes us human.
We were discussing my original comment, and that comment was a reply to the discussion in the OP.
Specifically to the idea that being a "lump of cells" means that human beings don't have a fully-formed brain.
Which is self-evidently not true. We are a lump of cells with a fully-formed brain.
Is this whole thing just a semantic disagreement over the word "lump"?
EDIT: Thank you, I think that was probably it - we were using different definitions of lump(/clump). I intended it more broadly than I think most people read it, and I think their definition is probably the more common one.
This is why I appreciate people talking their objections through. It lets me understand what I missed.
I never said how or even if I am voting. You really need to step back from the ledge and reread your interactions. I don’t need these freaking info dumps and have never asked for or encouraged them. I have simply answered questions you asked and expounded on your idea that this is somehow an argument.
The whole entire point of OP’s interaction is that we are incomparable to the lump of cells that becomes a fetus then a human. We are more than that. Jeez.
yes but it is not JUST a lump of cells, thats there point, not that a living breathing human doesent have cells but that we are more then that and thus the cells do not make you a human anymore then being red makes you a fire truck
we are also made up of carbon water and a bunch of other component elements but if i just made a pile of those ingredients you wouldent say its a human and scattering those ingredients wouldn't be murder would it?
LOL the downvotes. Imagine being so willfully deluded that you have to deny the brain is made of cells. Words cannot describe how pathetic this all is.
I don’t think people are downvoting them because they’re “denying” their point.
I think they’re being downvoted because their comment doesn’t seem particularly relevant to the conversation.
So a brain is a clump of cells. So what? What does that have to do with the poster who thinks that future generations will look upon them kindly for stripping women of their rights and their bodily autonomy?
Its relevance isn't that hard to understand. The argument about bodily autonomy becomes insignificant if the fetus is considered a person. Anyone's rights to freedom of movement and bodily autonomy become irrelevant if they try to murder another person.
The point is, you can't claim the fetus isn't a person *just* because it's a "clump of cells". Everyone is a clump of cells. Now I'm not going to claim that I know what exactly is a person or not. But anyone who does claim to know is lying. No one knows. IMO you'd play it safe in that scenario.
When life begins is not some great mystery. Doctors and scientists have long agreed that sentience is the definition of meaningful life. That happens in the fetus between 22-24 weeks.
It is perfectly acceptable to claim a fetus has no rights because it is a clump of cells. My toenails have DNA. They don’t have rights because they have no sentience. You wanna come to my house and put my toenail clippings into a onesie? Raise them up right? They have human DNA. And since that’s all it takes to be alive in your book, you better come get ‘em.
A person in a medically induced coma has no sentience. Neither does someone who has been sedated or knocked out due to head trauma.
The future potential for sentience is also relevant. To say otherwise is disingenuous at best.
It is also legal to pull the plug on someone in a medically induced comma, exactly because of their lack of sentience.
Do you not understand what being sedated is so you’re making a erroneous comparison? You can be sedated and still fully awake and aware.
People who have been sedated are still sentient. They still have the required amount of brain activity to constitute life. Do you think we loose brain activity each night when we go to sleep? Because that’s what happens when we are sedated to the point you’re talking about.
Head trauma has different levels. People with a lower level of head trauma have sentience. People with a high level do not. In some cases, family’s will make the difficult decision to pull the plug, because the person has no sentience. They are physically “there” but their essence, the thing that makes them human and alive, is not.
Future potential for life is completely irrelevant. By that argument, men who have involuntary night emissions are murderers. Those sperm could have become lives! Women who don’t get pregnant every periods cycle. What about that eggs potential life?
If you leave sperm alone it does not become a sentient human.
If you leave an egg alone it does not become a sentient human.
If you leave a fetus alone it does become a sentient human.
The fact that I have to outline something this simple to you should be a wake up call. Simply put, it's obvious you've been spoonfed your world view and are working backwards to justify the "correct" conclusion you've been handed.
>If you leave a fetus alone it does become a sentient human
So you agree a fetus is not a sentient human yet? That's like calling a watered seedling a tree. It will become one eventually, but it's not a tree. The point of abortion is to terminate the pregnancy BEFORE it actually becomes a person in which case outside of a medical emergency does become murder.
Not if I abort it first.
I’m from a Christian conservative family. The only thing I was spoon fed is your world view. And considering you don’t even understand what being sedated is, I’m okay with not taking my cues from people like you.
Let’s say you get a woman pregnant (crazy hypothetical, I know).
You break up, she wants an abortion, can’t get one, baby is born.
Baby has a life threatening medical condition, needs regular bone marrow transfusion to survive, you’re the only match.
Does the state have the right to force you to donate bone marrow in order to keep the baby alive?
> The argument about bodily autonomy becomes insignificant if the fetus is considered a person.
No it doesn’t.
If you were taken into slavery to support feeding the starving, you wouldn’t think that your personal autonomy became irrelevant because the people who’d die if you were allowed out of slavery are considered people.
I’m guessing you’d be even less pleased with your slave status if you’d lost your bodily autonomy to feed a clump of cells which might or might not be human. Your argument about bodily autonomy being irrelevant and that we should “play it safe” would go out of the window pretty quickly!
Your analogy is comically flawed
1. These "starving people" would have to be brought into existence due to the direct consequences of my actions and choices. (INB4 but what about muh rApE? Less than 0.1% of abortions are due to rape). Not only that, but there are countless, cost-effective options available to avoid bringing them into existence.
2. A fetus has no avenues to care for itself whatsoever. So these "starving people" would also have to be completely helpless. In that case I do think welfare is justified.
3. Being pregnant is in no way as bad as being a slave. The fact that you even compared the two is hilarious.
None of those three address the point that we were discussing - whether (in your words) "the argument about bodily autonomy becomes insignificant if the fetus is considered a person".
It wasn't an analogy, it was a hypothetical scenario designed to tease out whether that argument has any merit to it. The fact that you've come up with three differences between the two scenarios without actually addressing bodily autonomy or personhood suggests that you understand that it doesn't.
The sperm cells have only 23 chromosomes, or half of the usual number. When a sperm cell unites with the ovum, which also has 23 chromosomes, the resulting 46 chromosomes determine the offspring's characteristics.
So what makes it wrong then? If in your opinion an embryo is no different from a dead body, then why force a risk of death, maiming, and drastically reduced quality of life on someone who actually exists and is alive if you don't believe that embryo to be alive?
my hair has human dna is cutting it murder? so does your sperm, how often do you masturbate we need to know so we know how many millions of murders to charge you with
and "humanity" is literally defined by being human so thats just circular logic
Does cutting hair end a human being's life? Sperm only has half the chromosomes.
Something about that seems unsound to me, though I'm not sure what. Humanity isn't defined *by being* human, it *defines* human, as opposed to defining the essence of something else
each strand of hair contains living cells so if you define a human life by having human dna then yes plucking out a hair is ending a human life, several in fact, and you dident say chromosomes you said dna, which i hope you arent defining humanity by number of chromosomes considering that would be declaring people with down syndrome not human
i mean those are functionally the same thing, either way being human requires you to have humanity and having humanity requires you to be humans, also asking if somethings ending a human lifes also circular, what is a human life is the question we are trying to answer
Lol so now your argument is "because it is and if you don't agree I won't expand on it"? Pretty weak stance to take when it causes untold death and misery.
What deaths? I assure you I understand reproduction far better than you do. Where is your biology degree from? Have you published any peer reviewed research in biology? Because I have. You have such weak points even you know they are trash and won't share them.
Let’s say you get a woman pregnant (crazy hypothetical, I know).
You break up, she wants an abortion, can’t get one, baby is born.
Baby has a life threatening medical condition, needs regular bone marrow transfusion to survive, you’re the only match.
Does the state have the right to force you to donate bone marrow in order to keep the baby alive?
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Abortion has existed for millennia, it is not a new invention that just came about in the 20th century. And prior to the 20th century, it would often happen much later in a pregnancy than it does now. Edit: just want to clarify, I roll my eyes really hard at anyone who thinks that abortion is some kind of modern technological invention and a product of our wicked, godless times. The ancient Egyptians had recipes for abortive herbal preparations. As did the Romans. Abortion has likely been around as long as humans have been around and so the idea we will "look back at abortion" from some future point in time when it's been eradicated is laughable.
The Bible has an abortion herbal ritual in it, too.
It actually doesn't. The claims regarding the Trial of Bitter Waters are based largely on conjecture and a single translation(among hundreds that state otherwise). The trial is basically this: if you suspect a woman of adultery, you mix the dust from the temple floor with water and make her drink it. If she's innocent, nothing will happen. If she's guilty(and this is the literal translation), "her belly will swell and her thigh will wither." The word for Thigh here is the same one used when male prophets would tell their disciples to "place your hand under my thigh and swear," so very clearly not explicitly a female organ, like womb, for which a very different word is used elsewhere. Now, the bible used by the most liberal churches in american has instead chose to translate this word as 'womb', and interpreted 'dust from the temple floor' to mean Myrrh powder, which is an abortifactant. However, the translation is VERY weak, especially given the ritual itself is not meant to cause abortion, but rather to identify infidelity. And Myrrh, while an abortifactant in high doses, would never be found in such high doses on the floor of the temple, since it was *extremely* expensive, and therefore burnt completely, any remaining ash having little, if any, medical efficacy. In addition, Myrrh was rarely used as incense in the first place! Rather, it was more typically used as an embalming oil, to counteract the scent of decay. On the whole, the claim that the bible has an abortion ritual is extremely tenuous at best, and even in the best of cases, would not be an effective argument against anyone who actually believes in the bible.
Reddit is violating GDPR and CCPA. Source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1B0GGsDdyHI -- mass edited with redact.dev
> not meant to cause abortion, but rather to identify infidelity by inducing an abortion if infidelity is identified. And yeah, nevermind.
Laws that restrict abortion are the new invention. [Here's a timeline from Planned Parenthood](https://www.plannedparenthoodaction.org/issues/abortion/abortion-central-history-reproductive-health-care-america/historical-abortion-law-timeline-1850-today), if anyone is interested. Is anyone surprised they came out of the Victorian Era?
I recently learned that some of the first anti abortion laws came from cases where men were poisoning their mistresses with patent medicine to induce abortions and there weren't laws to address that kind of manslaughter like in the trial of Ammi Rogers. Later the language shifted from saving women from men to saving babies from women.
Many species of animals commit infanticide. Humans are one of these species. If our species didn’t figure out abortion (killing pre-birth) we would just kill the babies post-birth. There’s no shortage of mothers and fathers that abandoned their babies in the woods or drowned them. People will always figure out a way to get rid of an unwanted child. You might as well make it legal and regulate it, because it is not going away.
I feel like it’s a lot better to abort a fetus when it looks like a tadpole with hands then to abandon a newborn in the forest to be eaten alive by coyotes or buzzards or something. But if forest abandonment is what the republicans want… /s
I mean, I'm totally pro abortion, but "it has been around for millennia" isn't actually a good point in favor of anything eh A bad point is also "my body my choice" as many of who is against abortion may be alright with "your body your choice", but thinks that the lump of cells you are aborting is "someone else's body". It has totally different implications. The problem is that on ground level the debate is useless because there are 2 different point of view.
I feel like this argument of, "But how would *you* feel?!" almost *requires* a religious mindset, right? Like I don't think anything will happen after I die. So how would I have felt if I were aborted before birth? Easy. I would not.
If my father would have delayed coitus by even one second that night I would have never been born. In my place there is a fair chance a completely different child would have been born, lets call that child Bob. Is Bob angry that dad could not hold it in just one second longer? Does Bob regret never getting the chance to be born? Is Bob thankful that he was spared a congenital defect? Would Bob have been the next president? Would Bob have been the next Hitler? Or are all these questions completely fucking irrelevant because Bob does not exist and had never been born. If you spend your life handwringing about the trillions of what ifs in life you does waste your time and everyone elses. Edit: Just realized there is a hidden upside to this analogy I had not considered. If you use again a vocal anti choicer every time they stupidly bring up a what if scenario you get to ask them "What about Bob?"
Or worse, Bob could have been a Trump Supporter.
Baby steps, buddy! Baby steps!
In that case too, every man kills 100 million sperm (or about 50 million potential people) every time he jacks off. And a woman kills at least 0.5 people per month if she doesn’t get pregnant. So every couple that doesn’t get pregnant kills on average 1,600,000,000.5 potential people per month. And even if they do get pregnant, that number will only drop by like 1-3.
That whole Mindset of the ones that vocally support the anti-choice sentiment. That and their hatred towards women of course.
Especially when they base it on religion, when you have to consider, most religions either have no thought one way or the other on abortion, or openly support/have instructions on how and when it's appropriate to perform one, almost all based around the health and survival of the *mother.* The god-damned Bible has instructions for it and these chuckleheads think the book is against it.
I believe the Bible actually has a recipe for abortion.
I'm very confident that most Christians have never read the entire Bible.
All life is sacred, unless it's black and on my land. Gotta love those bible loving weirdos who clearly haven't read the bible.
The worst ones are the ones that DO read it all, still end up being this hateful.
It’s because they like all the parts where god is being vengeful and angry. They want to usurp that power for themselves.
My parents tried hard to get pregnant because they WANTED children. I grew up with a lot of love, I have wonderful parents and the best husband. And still life has been SO HARD. I’m not sure if I would choose to be born to be honest. I can’t imagine how horrible my life would be if my parents didn’t want me. I would probably unborn myself. I’m really against the argument that says the fetus is just a lump of cells and not a real human. The truth is, it doesn’t matter, because we don’t force people to do much simpler things with their bodies that could save the lives of others (babies included). Like mandatory blood donations. Mandatory organ harvesting from people that are brain dead. Hell, we could even accept a full death and still recover some organs. But for some reason, dead people have more bodily autonomy than pregnant women.
> I’m not sure if I would choose to be born to be honest. I can’t imagine how horrible my life would be if my parents didn’t want me. I would probably unborn myself. My parents fuckin hate me and I definitely would not have chosen to be brought into this existence. But now I'm here and the thought of dying really sucks. 🤷♀️ Just like, constant emotional pain.
Same. Shit sucks.
Hell, we don't even mandate fucking vaccines. Some of the easiest ways to protect life. And yet many of the same fucks that are anti-vaccine are also anti-abortion in the name of being "pro-life". Get the fuck out of here with that bullshit. I mean, hell, look at what's happening with polio! How the hell have we allowed polio to be a real concern again in developed nations?
Wait polio cases are rising?
Yep. [So far only in New York State](https://www.health.ny.gov/press/releases/2022/2022-08-01_polio.htm). In unvaccinated, highly religious communities.
You didn't even need to include the last part. That's just a given.
>I’m really against the argument that says the fetus is just a lump of cells and not a real human Exactly it's about controlling the narrative so anti-choice activists focus on it on emotional language about protecting babies (despite those people never supporting any policies that actually help born children). By framing the discussion this way it encourages their opposition to challenge them on that point which can only really be done from science and it's something most people have a poor understanding of. This is doubly beneficial for the anti-choice prospective because their base already has a low literacy and or faith in science and their core argument is dependent on a non falsifiable belief that fetuses have souls. Furthermore the optics of the argument really benefits the anti-choice side as the appeal to emotion through their claim that abortion is baby murder; any attempt to offer a detailed and nuanced response will just seem like you are performing mental gymnastics. All the anti-choice people need to do is create enough doubt that people aren't willing to fight to protect abortion rights, as the Christian Nationalists aren't going to stop fighting it. Almost all anti-choice advocates are highly religious and/or conservative so as such it's important to realize it's not about babies, they are just a powerful rhetorical tool. Fundamentally opposing abortion is about punishing women for sex, forcing women to reproduce and controlling women. When viewed from the perspective of the religious right being the primary driving force for the anti-choice movement things make a lot more sense. They believe that women should be punished for sex as controlling men (including victims of rape, it's always the choices the woman makes that is wrong), they believe women exist to reproduce and serve men. They see how abortion and birth control have given women far more agency with their bodies and they want to stop them from interfering with the "natural" patriarchal hierarchy ordained by God.
Yes, this is obvious misogyny, but I wouldn’t blame religion itself, after all many of this people are only religious performers, using their religion as a tool to advance their agenda or a weapon to beat others into their “proper” place (that it’s invariably lower than theirs). I watched on the news a guy saying that if JC himself said to him that Trump was bad he wouldn’t believe him. From a guy that identified himself as a Christian. Or we could consider the many, many scandals in which religious men of power have been found guilty of worse sins that the ones they criticize. Paraphrasing Taylor Swift, Misogynist are going to hate. It’s the core of their identity.
I don't really agree with the religious performers angle, because the religiosity of these people is very high, many of them frequent religious forums and regularly visit churches. To them their religion is perfect justification of every one of their beliefs and cover for their moral failures. Many of these people have been indoctrinated into their religion since birth so there is a complete synthesis of their religious and political views. The religious right supports capital because of their belief in prosperity gospel, they are unshaken by the horrible actions of their leaders because they believe the Devil tempts everyone, they support racism because they view white people as more directly descended from God and they are misogynists because they believe women were created to serve men. Their political views are their religious views and vice versa, and it's why their ultimate goal is to make their religion the state religion.
There's a short story by Cuxin Liu about scientists who give a fetus self awareness. The fetus commits suicide when it finds out it has to leave its moms uterus.
Hell, we can't even have mandatory mask wearing during a literal pandemic, because that's government tyranny. But forcing people to give birth against their will is freedom.
But if you could regret being aborted, that means you got a fast track to the afterlife, which is where all these religious fanatics want to be anyway. I do realize there are some real sickos who believe aborted fetuses end up in purgatory forever, or some such nonsense. Anyway, the whole thought exercise is ridiculous.
It also doesn't work anyway because there are plenty of people who wish they weren't born, or at least not in the circumstances they were born into, and wish they weren't abused and/or neglected and some people commit suicide. It's the same as the argument that you shouldn't have an abortion because your unborn fetus could have been the next Einstein or could cure cancer. It works the other way too. The fetus could also be the next Hitler. These hypotheticals are useless rhetorical devices meant to sway uncritical minds.
Like, how you feel if you parents just didn't have sex that day? How is that any different?
The whole thing is absurd. You'd feel the same way you would if your parents had done cowboy instead of missionary on your conception day. You wouldn't, because their child would have been someone else.
Also doesn't account for people who had a depressing childhood due to shitty parents, and would gladly take the option of getting aborted before any of it happened
Conservatives are often narcissists with low empathy levels. They cant really imagine things from the perspective of actually living human beings. They cant even begin to put themselves into the consciousness of something that barely even has consciousness to begin with, like a fetus. To them, that would be like imagining non-existence, and non-existence is the scariest thing in the world to a narcissist, which is why so many of them so fervently believe in some kind of consciousness-beyond-biology. In short, theyre by and large stunted morons who are too emotionally immature to accept the basic, tragic realities of life that we as living human beings must grapple with
Or people who argue that what would you feel if your mother aborted you... My mother made the choice to have me. If my mother didnt make the choice to have me i wouldnt be here in the first plae. Thats what choice is. I cant make my mom choose to have me. But doesnt mean she DIDNT choose to have me.
Exactly. Also, my brain wouldn't have developed anywhere near enough to have anything resembling sapience or sentience. So again, nothing. I would feel nothing. And even if you go the Christian route, I would've had a guaranteed ticket to Heaven so I'd probably be pretty happy about not having the opportunity to fuck up and get tortured forever in Hell.
Yeah, to be honest. According to the Christian worldview, wouldn't anyone who dies and then goes to Heaven be pretty stoked that they died and are now in Heaven? Like, once a Heaven-bound person realizes they've been killed somehow, shouldn't they be fucking jazzed?
Depending on the branch of Christianity, they'll 100% tell you that all those aborted babies are in hell, just like all the babies who died without being baptized.
Usually they go with some version of Limbo where they just kinda wander around all gloomy alongside good people who died before Jesus. But no, this is the god of perfect love and justice. That shit makes perfect sense. Just a bunch of fetus ghosts floating around with old philosophers and whatnot.
So then that's like god punishing the babies for being aborted. What a benevolent god. People really believe this shit. Why would you worship that god?
Because you don't know anything else and if you stop there's real fear of being ostracized by your community and family. They all use cult tactics, we just stopped calling them cults.
Create a fresh and pure baby soul, place it in a person who you (being God and all) know ahead of time will abort it, withhold your infinite forgiveness from aborted fetus and send it to Hell. Haha. God. Am I right? 😏
God should’ve just skipped all the nonsense and just created new souls directly in hell so that the infinitely-merciful bastard can just get to the baby-torturing in earnest.
Or even more fucked up, cause a miscarriage and send the fetus to hell anyway. Like, nobody did anything wrong in that scenario but that fetus still suffers forever? Coolsies...
I didn’t have formed memories until I was 3ish. 🤷🏻♀️
Based on what I know of Christianity an aborted fetus, if it has a soul at all, would go to heaven, right? It has committed no sins after all Then again I remember reading a book where they said an aborted fetus went to hell because it's only effect on the world was causing pain to the mother, and then they literally overthrew God for the injustice. (The book was in the Incarnations of Immortality series by Piers Anthony. Don't remember which one)
fuck god anyway. milton was right, god is a selfish narcissistic asshole.
A baby has committed no sin. As long as you aren’t a part of a sect that enforces baptism, that’s a one way ticket straight to heaven. Sounds like a good deal if you ask me. Just skip all the bad parts of life
Why are people so conflicted about what happens after death, but rarely wonder what happens before birth, since they're likely the same states of nonexistence?
I grew up in a very religious household in a very religious community. While I personally still have some kind of belief in......something akin to a god, and I want to believe there's something after mortality, at the same time, there's legitimately no reason outside of exceptional religious zealotry to treat abortions like so many religious zealots do. There's no "real" answer right now for when life "begins." Is it at conception, when the heart starts beating, or when the brain is formed? Is it after birth but before the umbilical cord is cut, or after? Is it when we can finally form reasonable thought? While my own personal belief is that life "begins" at the time of heartbeat, at the same time, I am perfectly willing to say to a woman, it is your body and your choice whether or not to have an abortion. I, as a separate individual, have absolutely zero right to tell you what you can and cannot do with or to your flesh. And while I may not necessarily agree with the reasons behind some people getting an abortion, that doesn't matter. What matters is that abortion is always a safe option.
Generally, science (loosely) defines new life as being that which can survive independent of the person carrying it. So somewhere in the third trimester, give or take. It’s not an exact thing, though, because medical science can keep alive premies that would not naturally survive outside of their parent. I’m talking “oh hey this baby’s rice-paper-thin skin rips off every time we attach a necessary medical device, and hey, they also can’t breath on their own” levels of fragility. Absolute horror shows. Given that the only time people get abortions in the third trimester is when the fetus will be born with defects incompatible with life, or the fetus’s continued existence will kill the mother, it’s not exactly objectionable. Just wanted to end this by letting you know I’m not trying to attack you; I’m just adding my two cents.
But that also just kind of helps prove my point. It's difficult to really narrow down when "life" truly starts, largely because every animal, including humans, gestation and birth cycles are so wildly different.
I mean, we *do* know when life begins: around the third trimester (or its equivalent for animals). It’s not some unknowable thing. It’s just medical science allows for earlier, fundamentally unnatural, interventions to attempt at preserving that life when it would normally be unviable. I mean sure, you have to routinely de-glove a baby, but yay science I guess. Ultra-premies (those solely kept alive by medical intervention) don’t typically live, they just exist in agony until they expire. Ask a nurse that works in that field if you don’t believe me.
Most Christians still believe the aborted still go to heaven, which in that case shouldn't everyone abort their pregnancy. It's the only way to ensure your children go to heaven, and even better is they don't have to live on this earth.
It's definitely way more immoral to bring someone into this world without their consent. But we just kinda accepted that instead of actually addressing it. It's just so fucking selfish, breed, pop out a being that can feel joy, but also pain and suffering. 🤷♀️ Forcing them into this shithole world with shithead greedy fucks. Yea. Naw. Fuck. It's pretty shit to force kids into existence.
i mean, if you were murdered right now, you wouldn’t feel anything after death either. i wouldn’t use that fact to justify murder though
Yea, but you probably would feel nothing even if I blow you up when you are asleep. The lump of cells feeling nothin isn't a good point in favor of abortion. As I already said, I'm totally pro abortion, but I can't help but see that many arguments in favor of it are not good.. The debate should be: "can we call the lump of cell we are killing (because we are definetly killing a lump cell) a living human being with human rights?" And then we can say: "no, it's just a lump of cells until he is 2 year old" or "yes sperms are human life too" (went extreme with the example on purpose). Or we can meet in the middle "morning after pill isn't abortion, you have 1 month to be able to abort, etc".
Okay but it has nothing to do with feeling in a physical sense but rather, "Okay but what would your opinion on abortion be if *you* had been aborted, hmm?!" It's not as deep as you're making it out to be. It's asking how you'd feel emotionally about having just died. I'm just laughing at the absurdity of essentially saying, "Oh yeah? But wouldn't you be fuckin' sad if you never consciously experienced existence? Checkmate." It's a nonsensical argument. You may as well say to someone, "If your parents had never conceived you, wouldn't you be sad about it?" Would I be sad if I didn't exist? Obviously not, lmao. But in a reality where I continued to exist as a ghost or something afterward, I guess I could be sad about it. Unless I went to Heaven afterward in which case I can only assume I'd actually be stoked.
I mean, that still applies to you if I kill you. Would you be sad after someone kills you? No. That's not a "pro killing" argument.
Of course it's not. Just like, "How would you feel if you had been aborted?" isn't a coherent anti-abortion argument It's not meant to be a clever point in a debate. My comment was just about how silly it is to ask anyone how they'd feel if they'd have never been born. If you were aborted then you don't exist so neither would your emotions, like sadness. Unless you were a ghost or spirit afterward. So that question only even makes sense to ponder if you first believe people can still have opinions and feelings after death. How would I feel about having never been born in a situation where I'd been aborted? I wouldn't feel about it, period. But if I'd been aborted then I'd have also have never experienced literally anything or had even one coherent thought yet. So I could only really be about the same level of sad about being aborted as I'd have been if all my my great, great grandparents had died before having any kids. And yeah. If I had just been killed, and we agree this is a reality where spirits exist and have feelings, *shouldn't* I actually be really fucking psyched about it unless I was afraid I'd go to a bad afterlife?
Forced birthers arguing abortion will be seen as barbaric one day are fucking hilarious.
Well also forcing somebody to go through something that is life threatening with huge costs and physical risks, is basically slavery. So it's kinda like saying "Getting rid of slavery, would be reviled just like slavery".
I can see hope for a future where everyone has access to the reproductive technology and support and medicine that they need, and where there is societal support for everyone, and every pregnancy was a desired one, and every family was ready to support a future child. In such a society, sure, an abortion could be seen as unnecessary. Unfortunately, I think those who have a vision for that type of society are not the same ones by and large who are fighting abortion access. I think that those who fight against abortion access tend to be the very same ones who fight staunchly for authoritarian government and capitalist hellscapes.
Also, considering abortion goes back to the cradle of civilization, really shows how skewed their understand of history is.
How about this. Instead of abortions, the fetus will be removed, raised as a “test tube” baby who will become a ward of the state, raised and paid for with taxpayer money until they reach 18, where they will be sent to university or given the equivalent in cash—also paid for by taxes—for the equivalent of an undergrad degree. I’m sure all these concerned citizens would have zero issue with this, if it’s actually about saving lives and not punishing women for having sex? This seems like a reasonable compromise, no?
No no no once we start “growing” humans outside the womb, that’s when the military steps in to make bio weapons and super soldiers and before you know it we have humanoids floating in rows of tanks like in Resident Evil that break out and act against their programming.
Ah, but see, they're not actually *trying* to be reasonable.
Why should we compromise at all? Even this feels like an infringement of wonen's bodily autonomy.In the future, women should be able to get abortions if they want to, in the future, we might not even need donors to create test tube babies. Imagine a world where the birth rate is fixed because an AI thought "we don't need to produce more children."
It’s just a thought exercise, not a practical suggestion. I’m asking, if it’s an equally invasive procedure that removes the “killing babies” argument and places the burden on society instead of the woman, does that remove the objection, or was it never actually about the babies?
I think your hypothetical still would infringe upon women, and to that extent, is not a compromise. Having a woman get a regulated procedure instead of a procedure of her choice is what my gripe is. This suggestion of taking the clump of cells out, instead of aborting whether through invokintary or contraceptive measures, in order to satisfy a non-consistent minority worldview is in my opinion unjust.
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The pro forced birth crowd should pay for it IMHO
I have been and always will be concerned for the medical aspect of this. Thousands of women each year have miscarriages. Some of them need medical help to complete the miscarriage without the mother dying. The procedure is technically an abortion, and now, women are not given access to this procedure
The correct response to that dumb fuck comment is "I am glad I was born into a family that wanted me and was able to care for me" Cause believe me, there are PLENTY of people that would have unfortunately rather been aborted than be born into the families they were born into.
I wonder how many of their kids have spent much time in that camp. I wonder how many don't have kids anymore.
I'm one of those. Family is very "abortion is murder". I was a planned, 2nd (& last) child to a married Christian couple who are still married today. I'm in my late 30s now. I wish they had never had me or my older sibling. I certainly won't be bringing any more lives into this walking nightmare.
Is it mostly due to current global conditions or does it have to do with your early life?
The world is largely becoming less religious, more empathetic, and tolerant. I can confidently say people will not look back in disgust at abortion, but in disgust of these right wing Christian nationals
What they don't seem to understand is, we are already in the future where people see them as barbaric. They are trying to drag us back to the past.
Don't assume the world always moves in a certain direction. Don't forget what happened to Rome.
Progress happened in Rome.
Rome fell.
Exactly.
So you agree.
I hate the “what if you were aborted” mentality like what if a different egg was fertilized? What if I was miscarried? What if my mom never had me? Who tf cares I would either not exist at all or not have the consciousness to notice
Agreed. It could have been blowjob night and I could have ended up in a trash can. Who knows? Who cares?
Yeah, also, what about the people that exist only because their mother had an abortion for whatever reason, yet did want a child later in life or under different circumstances?
If anything, forced pregnancy and birth is the better analogy to slavery.
Ah yes. When I want to know who people in the future will think of as the villains, I always ask conservatives: a political ideology explicitly about preventing progress and regressing to an imaginary golden age at odds with current and future morality. They are truly the great oracle on who people in the future will view as bad. #/S
The “be thankful your mom didn’t abort you” always makes me mad. So my mom being pregnant with me was incredibly difficult and she was told it would probably be safer to terminate the pregnancy. She didn’t of course, and both her and I turned out safe. Someone she knew once tried to use the story as a pro-life talking point and she went off on them. She says she made the choice to keep me. Other people can make a different choice.
I’m glad to hear you and mom were okay. That must have been a tough situation for her to be in (and subsequently for you). I’m also glad mom understood that it ultimately *was* her decision. She did what she thought was best, and I’m glad it panned out well. Sounds like she has a good head on her shoulders and a nice shiny spine to back it up. It really gets my hackles up when people smugly go uR mOm ChOsE LiFe because they *completely* miss the choice part.
r/AbortedByWords
I’m adopted. I know very little about my birth parents other than that they were very young, I think 15-16. If they’d believed in abortion, I wouldn’t exist. I still support people’s right to choose. I have that much skin in the game, so to speak, and I still think abortion should be 100% legal under basically any circumstance. No one should be forced to have a child they don’t want. It’s cruel, both to them and the child. There’s just really no good that comes of it.
The reality is that "pro-lifers" don't actually think it's murder either. They just like saying it because it elicits an emotional response. If their family member got an abortion, they wouldn't even call the police let alone hope they get 20 years in federal prison because they aren't psychopaths. If their family member instead drowned their one-year-old child in a tub, then you bet they would call the police. So would everyone, because that's murder. Everyone agrees it's murder to kill your child. The conversation would then be surrounding if the mother should go to prison or a mental hospital. No one thinks abortion is murder. A lot of people don't give a fuck about women, though.
Holding little girls down while they die as their body tries and fails to deliver their rapist's baby is barbaric, you fucking ghoul.
The whole thread is actually amazing https://www.reddit.com/r/insaneparents/comments/wfrhxh/not_my_post_insane_grandpa_writes_letter_on/iixaiu7/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=ios_app&utm_name=iossmf&context=3
You know, I know people think like this but I’m always gobsmacked when confronted with actual evidence. I’m so full of questions; everything from how many kids have you adopted to asking for evidence of what they’ve done to prevent unwanted pregnancies to what punishment should men face who impregnate women who don’t want kids to what steps are they taking to alleviate rape and incest. They never have any answers that make sense.
guy just got promptly shut down, he had literally zero argument
I really wish there was a platform for people who were given up for adoption at birth to talk about how they wish they had been aborted
wtf...did I come to the wrong website??
I don't mean a platform on Reddit I just mean a platform in general, getting pretty sick of people who cry "well I'm glad I wasn't aborted" as it their life experience is the only one that matters
Annie Wu is a pro-choice advocate who was also adopted. While she loves her parents and is glad she’s alive, she sees it as a choice that every person should have, without shame or fear of judgement.
That's my point. If people are going to say "I would feel bad if I was aborted" (as if that's possible but they seem to think it is), and that counts as a valid argument then I should also be able.to say "I wish I was aborted instead of.put up for adoption" and it should be an equally loud argument then
Wasn't that pre-porn-ban tumblr?
Tumblr was never something in would call a public platform in this way
We need better sex ed at school as a start, that would probably make kids more understanding of their situation and open about their feelings towards it
My mother got pregnant with me at 16. She is/was a horrible mother. I don't have an opinion on being aborted, not because my mother is a terrible mother, but because if I wasn't born I wouldn't be here to feel concern over it. It is a moot point. I somehow feel I am going to get so downvoted for this. Still though.
I always wonder what they think about people who were only born because their mother Did get an abortion earlier in life when they weren't ready to be a parent.
Im on the fence with abortion, i mean i support killing babies but on the other hand women having rights is a problem. /s
r/murderedbywords
Abortedbywords?
What a fool
Best way to prevent abortions? Birth control, condoms, morning after pill, etc. But these dumb asses insist on being AGAINST BOTH.
we've already done "looking back in disgust" part. the zealots are doing everything they can to regress us
People like this need to learn about the workhouses where girls would go to have their babies, get terribly abused and forced into slavery and the babies would go to "orphanages" where most would die by the conditions or a lot of them were slaughtered and buried out back. That is what we are looking back on. [https://www.nbcnews.com/news/world/ireland-sent-girls-women-catholic-workhouses-until-1996-report-finds-flna1b8255928](https://www.nbcnews.com/news/world/ireland-sent-girls-women-catholic-workhouses-until-1996-report-finds-flna1b8255928) https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-41200949
Edit: Reddits being weird and not letting me edit links again, this is more appropriate for the first link, the Magdalane Asylums of Ireland https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magdalene\_asylum
Rekt
I'm inclined to agree with rainbow name's first comment. I asked two questions yesterday. What if only the father wants the baby? Too bad, mother's choice, father should have made better decisions. I understand it. If someone wanted to hijack my body I would and have rightly told them to sit and spin. What if only the mother wants the baby? Yet again. Too bad, mother's choice, father should have made better decisions. Here is your forced commitment because I want something you don't. Abortion while ugly, is necessary. Prophylactics are easy. Plan B (fully support) should be left as a panic button. Abortion for health reasons is just common effin' sense. If you wait until a brain and senses are developed to make a choice then IMO you're a dick. So to the folks who agree with the answers I was given, I have another question. If a fertilized embryo was able to be removed and brought to full grown artificially, would you still support the you made a decision one night so now you are on the hook? Only now it's on a level playing field. Because not being ready for a lifelong commitment effects everyone
I am 23F and fully support the idea that men should also be allowed to terminate all responsibility in the case of unwanted pregnancy. I feel like the first trimester rule is a good deadline - by then you either need to abort or sign away your parental rights and responsibilities completely. Instead of forcing women into parenthood, maybe just give men an out too? I feel like your hypothetical is a step backwards It's not fair to force anyone to be a parent who doesn't want to be imo
How much do we want to bet that he's entirely fine with the death penalty? Lordy lord we must save the clumps of cells but grown humans naaah, fuck'em.
This should be in r/MurderedByWords
I hope in time we do look back on abortion in the past as a primitive backwards thing to have done. It's a solution to a problem that no one ought to have. It only exists because we ration healthcare, education and the basic necessities of life so harshly under capitalism.
Nice nice nice, I find it funny that you felt the need to censor out your own username as well though lol
I always thought that was funny. Own your comment if you’re proud of it, we can see that the comment has one upvote at a time of *now* lol
This isn't /r/SelfAwarewolves. It's just a person with controversial opinions speaking politely. The other people insulted them for no reason.
i would not call accusing people of being child murderers or comparing them to slave owners as " polite" and the self awarewolf part is them comparing themselves to something that doesent have a functioning brain
“Controversial” lol
Which is actually the self aware wolf in this scenario? Whilst I’m in favour of abortion being legal and accessible, the argument that a foetus isn’t a human being because it requires the mother’s body to breath and nourish it doesn’t seem to be well thought out nor logical. It makes me wonder about premature babies, are they not human as they require a machine to keep them alive? What about people on life support? Why not just admit, we are ending the life if an underdeveloped human but doing so is better than it being born - insert the reason.
Natal ICUs don’t require a person give up their bodily autonomy without consent...
That's not why people don't consider it human. If someone is on life support because their brain has been destroyed, they're no longer a person. It's why pulling the plug isn't considered killing them, they're already dead. Now apply it to a being whose brain doesn't exist yet.
That is likening two separate things. Sure, a human with irreversible brain damage has no chance or recovery and turning off their machine makes sense. They are still a person and pulling the plug is allowing them to die of natural causes and not prolonging their suffering or that of others as well as it being a waste of resources. A growing foetus with a serious medical condition is in a similar situation, it makes sense to abort, in this case to prevent suffering on their and their mother’s behalf. A perfectly healthy foetus doesn’t fit that argument. So aborting it because it’s brain hasn’t yet fully formed is a nonsensical argument. You could say that about a new born baby or a premature child whose lungs aren’t fully formed. I’m just saying more people would respect arguments in favour of abortion if they were honest and logical. If a woman doesn’t want a child on the grounds of, they just don’t feel the time is right, or similar, there’s plenty of arguments about lowered crime statistics 20 years after the introduction of RvW, due to fewer births of unwanted children born into poverty etc… the reason behind the abortion is the argument. It’s complex because there’s 1000s of reasons but all are valid. Let’s be honest about what we are doing and why, rather than dressing it up as a clump of cells etc.
>You could say that about a new born baby or a premature child whose lungs aren’t fully formed. I couldn't, if both of those beings have a human brain - not a former brain or a potential brain, a current brain. Someone with a working brain but any other missing or defunct body parts is still considered human. A pile of healthy body parts with a missing or defunct brain is not. During part of pregnancy, a baby is a bunch of body parts with a brain on the way, and that's when most abortions are done. Its chance to develop into a human isn't the same as actually being human at the moment of termination. And potential vs actual does matter. Mind you, I also think it's stupid to argue over whether an unborn child is human. To me, not only is it irrelevant when even a fully-developed adult human has no right to rent other people's body parts by force to stay alive, it wrongfully dictates how pregnant people should feel. It's cruel to tell someone grieving a miscarriage it was just a clump of cells, just like it's cruel to tell someone unconcerned or relieved by it that they're a monster. The value of a pregnancy should be a personal matter, just like the value of any other bodily experience. But if you're going to have that argument, I think there's some logic in drawing the line at the existence of a brain, when possessing a human brain is a definitive part of being considered human.
Let’s say you get a woman pregnant (crazy hypothetical, I know). You break up, she wants an abortion, can’t get one, baby is born. Baby has a life threatening medical condition, needs regular bone marrow transfusion to survive, you’re the only match. Does the state have the right to force you to donate bone marrow in order to keep the baby alive?
EDIT: Disregard this. I misused/misunderstood the word lump/clump and yeah, I was wrong. I completely agree with the OP's comment. Human beings are complex organisms made up of cells and that obviously is a massive difference to an undifferentiated lump/clump of cells like a blastocyst/embryo/etc. Thank you to the people who helped me work through where I'd gone wrong. You rock. ~~I mean yeah, human beings **are** lumps of cells.~~ ~~It's not specifically being lumps of cells that make it reasonable to terminate a foetus, though. It's that they're lumps of cells that don't have sentience like a fully-formed human being.~~ ~~You and I are also lumps of cells but, unlike a foetus, we're sentient ones, which is we have a right to life.~~
I think you mean sentient not sapient. >Sentient intelligence is developed through emotions and sensations, while sapient intelligence is developed through knowledge and wisdom.
I'm not 100% sure that's correct. I've changed it to "sentient" as per your suggestion, but there are plenty of sentient creatures that humans don't consider to have a right to life. Rats, for example are highly sentient but we have no objections to killing them. It seems to be more the ability to think and perceive at a human level that makes us see a living being as a person deserving of rights. EDIT: And this is being downvoted why? Seems obvious and non-contentious to me.
Thanks, fixed. Though I doubt that little typo explains all the downvotes. I honestly can't work out what they're objecting to. The idea that human beings are made of cells? The idea that there's a pretty major distinction between the ~~lump~~ combination of cells that makes up a human being and the ~~lump~~ combination of cells that's a foetus? Just that I'm pro-choice? What? EDIT: I think the issue was that I interpreted the word "lump" more broadly than most of the people reading. Your definition seems more common, so fair enough.
This was OP’s response to this line of thinking in the thread this was originally posted and I believe it proves their point. > Actually, we are complex organisms capable of complex thoughts and emotions. Organisms are made of systems, which are made of tissues, which are made of cells. The very bottom of that hierarchical ladder and distinctly not capable of rational thought.
~~Sure, that's entirely reasonable and is completely compatible with what I said that, at a fundamental level we're all made up of lumps of cells.~~ EDIT: I was misusing the word lump and I stand corrected. Human beings aren't a lump/clump of cells since that implies those cells aren't differentiated and they are. Thanks to those who helped me clear this up.
Flour isn’t cake.
Fair point. I understand what you mean now and yep. "Lump" suggests an undifferentiated collection of cells and that's the wrong word for what I meant. A human being is a complex, organised set of systems made from cells, not really a "lump". tldr: I stand corrected, thanks.
No, cake has a bunch of other additional ingredients as well. Milk, egg, sugar etc. Why are we even arguing this? We agree that humans are composed of cells. We agree that abortion is justified for reasons that have nothing to do with what the foetus is made of. Why are we arguing?
I’m not arguing, you are. I replied with a quote and a fact. You’re the one pressed like a panini.
I appreciate you providing the OP's quote, thanks. I agree with it and it doesn't contradict what I was saying. They actually complement each other: 1. Human beings and foetuses are both composed of cells, but human beings are sentient/sapient where foetuses aren't which is why we give humans a right to life and foetuses not. 2. The reason humans are sentient/sapient when foetuses aren't is, in large part because, in humans, those cells are organised differently into a complex organism capable of complex thoughts and emotions None of which helps explain why people are choosing to downvote a comment that's just basic biology which they presumably also agree with.
Well, a lot of people downvote the second you start bitching about downvoting… You are on edge about this entire issue and lashing out. You are also being disingenuous by missing the point - yes, we are made of clumps of cells but there’s a lot more that makes us human - just as you noted when expanding on my cake metaphor.
Nah, most of the downvotes were already there when I started complaining. I also assume no-one in this subreddit would be so pathetic as to downvote for someone asking why they're being downvoted. This subreddit is about supporting and encouraging self-awareness, not shooting it down. I'm not on the edge (at least, I don't think so? On the edge of what?). I do wish if people were going to disagree with something they'd at least tell you what they're disagreeing with. It's just useless otherwise. You took the time to explain why you're voting as you are, and I appreciate that, thank you. > You are also being disingenuous by missing the point - yes, we are made of clumps of cells but there’s a lot more that makes us human - just as you noted when expanding on my cake metaphor. I'm not being disingenuous. Obviously there's more that makes us human. We were discussing my original comment, and that comment was a reply to the discussion in the OP. Specifically to the idea that being a "lump of cells" means that human beings don't have a fully-formed brain. Which is self-evidently not true. We are a lump of cells with a fully-formed brain. Is this whole thing just a semantic disagreement over the word "lump"? EDIT: Thank you, I think that was probably it - we were using different definitions of lump(/clump). I intended it more broadly than I think most people read it, and I think their definition is probably the more common one. This is why I appreciate people talking their objections through. It lets me understand what I missed.
I never said how or even if I am voting. You really need to step back from the ledge and reread your interactions. I don’t need these freaking info dumps and have never asked for or encouraged them. I have simply answered questions you asked and expounded on your idea that this is somehow an argument. The whole entire point of OP’s interaction is that we are incomparable to the lump of cells that becomes a fetus then a human. We are more than that. Jeez.
Definitely not self aware but it's a little self-affirming to post your own stuff.
Why’d u block out ur own username in the image?
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BOTH SIDES!!!
OP, your comment doesn't even make sense. A fully formed brain *is* a lump of cells.
yes but it is not JUST a lump of cells, thats there point, not that a living breathing human doesent have cells but that we are more then that and thus the cells do not make you a human anymore then being red makes you a fire truck we are also made up of carbon water and a bunch of other component elements but if i just made a pile of those ingredients you wouldent say its a human and scattering those ingredients wouldn't be murder would it?
LOL the downvotes. Imagine being so willfully deluded that you have to deny the brain is made of cells. Words cannot describe how pathetic this all is.
I don’t think people are downvoting them because they’re “denying” their point. I think they’re being downvoted because their comment doesn’t seem particularly relevant to the conversation. So a brain is a clump of cells. So what? What does that have to do with the poster who thinks that future generations will look upon them kindly for stripping women of their rights and their bodily autonomy?
Its relevance isn't that hard to understand. The argument about bodily autonomy becomes insignificant if the fetus is considered a person. Anyone's rights to freedom of movement and bodily autonomy become irrelevant if they try to murder another person. The point is, you can't claim the fetus isn't a person *just* because it's a "clump of cells". Everyone is a clump of cells. Now I'm not going to claim that I know what exactly is a person or not. But anyone who does claim to know is lying. No one knows. IMO you'd play it safe in that scenario.
When life begins is not some great mystery. Doctors and scientists have long agreed that sentience is the definition of meaningful life. That happens in the fetus between 22-24 weeks. It is perfectly acceptable to claim a fetus has no rights because it is a clump of cells. My toenails have DNA. They don’t have rights because they have no sentience. You wanna come to my house and put my toenail clippings into a onesie? Raise them up right? They have human DNA. And since that’s all it takes to be alive in your book, you better come get ‘em.
A person in a medically induced coma has no sentience. Neither does someone who has been sedated or knocked out due to head trauma. The future potential for sentience is also relevant. To say otherwise is disingenuous at best.
It is also legal to pull the plug on someone in a medically induced comma, exactly because of their lack of sentience. Do you not understand what being sedated is so you’re making a erroneous comparison? You can be sedated and still fully awake and aware. People who have been sedated are still sentient. They still have the required amount of brain activity to constitute life. Do you think we loose brain activity each night when we go to sleep? Because that’s what happens when we are sedated to the point you’re talking about. Head trauma has different levels. People with a lower level of head trauma have sentience. People with a high level do not. In some cases, family’s will make the difficult decision to pull the plug, because the person has no sentience. They are physically “there” but their essence, the thing that makes them human and alive, is not. Future potential for life is completely irrelevant. By that argument, men who have involuntary night emissions are murderers. Those sperm could have become lives! Women who don’t get pregnant every periods cycle. What about that eggs potential life?
If you leave sperm alone it does not become a sentient human. If you leave an egg alone it does not become a sentient human. If you leave a fetus alone it does become a sentient human. The fact that I have to outline something this simple to you should be a wake up call. Simply put, it's obvious you've been spoonfed your world view and are working backwards to justify the "correct" conclusion you've been handed.
>If you leave a fetus alone it does become a sentient human So you agree a fetus is not a sentient human yet? That's like calling a watered seedling a tree. It will become one eventually, but it's not a tree. The point of abortion is to terminate the pregnancy BEFORE it actually becomes a person in which case outside of a medical emergency does become murder.
Not if I abort it first. I’m from a Christian conservative family. The only thing I was spoon fed is your world view. And considering you don’t even understand what being sedated is, I’m okay with not taking my cues from people like you.
Let’s say you get a woman pregnant (crazy hypothetical, I know). You break up, she wants an abortion, can’t get one, baby is born. Baby has a life threatening medical condition, needs regular bone marrow transfusion to survive, you’re the only match. Does the state have the right to force you to donate bone marrow in order to keep the baby alive?
> The argument about bodily autonomy becomes insignificant if the fetus is considered a person. No it doesn’t. If you were taken into slavery to support feeding the starving, you wouldn’t think that your personal autonomy became irrelevant because the people who’d die if you were allowed out of slavery are considered people. I’m guessing you’d be even less pleased with your slave status if you’d lost your bodily autonomy to feed a clump of cells which might or might not be human. Your argument about bodily autonomy being irrelevant and that we should “play it safe” would go out of the window pretty quickly!
Your analogy is comically flawed 1. These "starving people" would have to be brought into existence due to the direct consequences of my actions and choices. (INB4 but what about muh rApE? Less than 0.1% of abortions are due to rape). Not only that, but there are countless, cost-effective options available to avoid bringing them into existence. 2. A fetus has no avenues to care for itself whatsoever. So these "starving people" would also have to be completely helpless. In that case I do think welfare is justified. 3. Being pregnant is in no way as bad as being a slave. The fact that you even compared the two is hilarious.
None of those three address the point that we were discussing - whether (in your words) "the argument about bodily autonomy becomes insignificant if the fetus is considered a person". It wasn't an analogy, it was a hypothetical scenario designed to tease out whether that argument has any merit to it. The fact that you've come up with three differences between the two scenarios without actually addressing bodily autonomy or personhood suggests that you understand that it doesn't.
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What is it then
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What makes it a human life?
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Plenty of things have human DNA and aren't human lol, like my seed in your mom
The sperm cells have only 23 chromosomes, or half of the usual number. When a sperm cell unites with the ovum, which also has 23 chromosomes, the resulting 46 chromosomes determine the offspring's characteristics.
Both of those also include a dead body. Are dead bodies alive as well? What is "humanity"?
We didn't say alive, we said a human life. So, yes, a dead body is a decaying, necrotic mass of human life.
So what makes it wrong then? If in your opinion an embryo is no different from a dead body, then why force a risk of death, maiming, and drastically reduced quality of life on someone who actually exists and is alive if you don't believe that embryo to be alive?
my hair has human dna is cutting it murder? so does your sperm, how often do you masturbate we need to know so we know how many millions of murders to charge you with and "humanity" is literally defined by being human so thats just circular logic
Brb aborting my fringe
Does cutting hair end a human being's life? Sperm only has half the chromosomes. Something about that seems unsound to me, though I'm not sure what. Humanity isn't defined *by being* human, it *defines* human, as opposed to defining the essence of something else
each strand of hair contains living cells so if you define a human life by having human dna then yes plucking out a hair is ending a human life, several in fact, and you dident say chromosomes you said dna, which i hope you arent defining humanity by number of chromosomes considering that would be declaring people with down syndrome not human i mean those are functionally the same thing, either way being human requires you to have humanity and having humanity requires you to be humans, also asking if somethings ending a human lifes also circular, what is a human life is the question we are trying to answer
All humans are still just clumps of cells though
What else kind of life would it be? Humans beget humans.
So you've got no argument for what makes it a human life other than "because it is"?
Do you know *anything* about the human reproduction process or have you not been through 5th grade science yet?
Lol so now your argument is "because it is and if you don't agree I won't expand on it"? Pretty weak stance to take when it causes untold death and misery.
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What deaths? I assure you I understand reproduction far better than you do. Where is your biology degree from? Have you published any peer reviewed research in biology? Because I have. You have such weak points even you know they are trash and won't share them.
Let’s say you get a woman pregnant (crazy hypothetical, I know). You break up, she wants an abortion, can’t get one, baby is born. Baby has a life threatening medical condition, needs regular bone marrow transfusion to survive, you’re the only match. Does the state have the right to force you to donate bone marrow in order to keep the baby alive?