Army of GOD wrote:Lootifer wrote:I'm pretty sure most pro-abortion people (such as myself) are against late term abortions; if only because you've already had 5-6 months to decide and should have well and truly made up your mind by then.
That's an awful argument though. If abortion is legal, then they should be legal until the child is out of the mother, as PLAYER gave me a satisfying definition of a child (it's really the only point at which the "being" [watching my syntax] is discretely a child or just a potential child). I understand the probability of survival of a child increases probably exponentially at the end of the pregnancy, but choosing an arbitrary percentage and claiming that abortions past this point are immoral seems like a pretty ambiguous argument.
You bring up a good point, AoG.
Both sides run up against a problem with the slippery-slope, or "beard" argument, in that their reasons and standards, taken alone, would end up justifying ridiculous things that even they don't support. The pro-abortion side's argument from ability to survive independently, taken to its extreme, could justify infanticide; as a matter of fact, how many of us would be safe, since in this computer age, how many could really survive without other people to run the plants that purify our water, and to kill the chickens and wrap them up in plastic for the supermarket? On the other hand, the anti-abortion side's arguments from "potential for life" could make it murder to choose
not to have sex, or other similarly silly things.
Note that I have applied this to
both sides.
So I agree with you that we have to pick a point at which we say that the fetus is a human being with the rights of a human being. That seems pretty clear. It also seems clear that whatever the point, it will seem "counter-intuitive" or arbitrary and silly in certain ways. Now you and Player have proposed "birth", but you yourselves had to fudge that and go back to the developmental and viability standards to see how long
before birth is OK, since I think we all agree that the "being" (staying with your "syntax" {technically "semantics", but that's another subject}), ten seconds before she passes through the birth canal is not significantly different from ten seconds after. That puts us back in the "slippery beard", and that's a problem.
That is why I believe it has to be at conception. As someone posted earlier in the thread, at that point there is a being, an entity, that just did not exist before. This is the only point that is immune to any degree to the "slippery beard". The courts, what do they use to determine an individual's identity? DNA. At this point, the being has her own complete DNA, her own identity, different from the mother or the father or anyone else in the world. (even an identical twin wouldn't exist yet.)
There are other arguments that I would give to someone who shares my cosmology, but I think this is pretty strong from a strictly logical and medical viewpoint.
The right answer to the wrong question is still the wrong answer to the real question.
