Fetus to testify in Ohio court

Someone brought up the subject of animal cruelty back when we were talking sapience. But oddly enough, killing animals is not always considered animal cruelty, far from it.

torturing them is, of course. We hold non-sapient sentients to different standards of Fate Worse than Death than ours.

And non-sentients "have it even worse", for lack of better words.

The great debate of abortions is in which category the fetus fits at various times of pregnancy.

The abortion debate shouldn't be about morality, in my opinion. It should be more on whether or not we should allow the rights of an unborn child supersede that of the, well, you know...LIVING mother.

But the issue is present, because there is the question of which rights of the fetus or mother are broken by the abortion or lack thereof.

Some rights are judged more important than others. The right to live is considered very important for sapient people.

edited 11th Mar '11 6:22:36 AM by Medinoc

I agree with Lewis Black on the whole abortion "debate". It's not really a debate at this point, as major voices being heard are just flinging their moral, ethical, and religious belief structures at their opponents and calling themselves "better".

We, as a [human] race, are lacking crucial information to the debate (as far as I know, I'm not sure if we're figured it out or not by now, but I highly doubt it). We don't know when life begins, or when it ends. We have good ideas, we have a slew of guesses on the subject, but we don't know, which is what we need: solid evidence to back up a claim. And once we figure that out, the debate solves itself! If, say, a child is alive at conception, then any abortion is illegal, since you'd be killing a human that's alive, which is murder in America.

Again, as far as I know, we don't know when life begins or ends yet.

Actually, we do. Life begins before conception. Because the sperm and eggs are still living. And immediately upon fertilization, the resulting embryo is also living (they meet all the biological criteria for 'life'). The problem is that it doesn't say anything about the morality of killing it, because we're perfectly fine with killing other living organisms, as can be seen by, say, commercially marketed antibacterial soaps. Not to mention the mere act of sex amounts to genocide against sperm, since only one out of millions will actually survive.

edited 11th Mar '11 10:55:14 AM by Miijhal

The sperm argument is a broken window fallacy. Let me put it this way: If guys didn't knock their rocks off, the sperm sitting down in the pouch between their legs would eventually be turned into waste and exit out the rear.

I apparently had no idea that I should've made special mention on the knowledge of human life beginning, since the issue with abortion is about potential killing a human instead of, oh I don't know, a carpet with gravy on it.

And as far as I know, we can't prove when a human life begins or ends, so we're still in the black on that. Sperm, eggs, and all that other jazz has the potential for life, but that's not what we're defending or arguing about. Otherwise, we'd see a lot more of these bleeding hearts defending the frozen food sections of grocery stores with their lives, and being sued by lawyers everywhere for doing something akin to farting on flies.

Hell, half of the time, the debate is still fueled by people who can't figure out the difference between the potential for life and having life. Strange, most of these people aren't the kind of people most folks would want to create children with in the first place.

@Sakan4k: I don't know which definition of 'morality' your using but in principle I agreed.

It is absurd to regard abortion as a simple 'woman's issue' or 'religious issue'. It's a fundamental matter of human rights. Remove the politics from the debate and it's becomes a simple question of who's rights are more important.

Does the personal freedoms of a woman trump her unborn child's right to life?

^ Not entirely true. The prevailing reason for why women shouldn't be allowed abortions of medical necessity is "good does not spring from evil". If abortion is intrinsically evil (not just murder, an earthly crime), then debate is out of the question.

The problem is, we don't know what degree of rights the unborn child has and when it has them.

Within a few hours of conception, it's less elaborate than plant life, whose right to live we deem unimportant on a small scale.

I would tend to disagree with that. If there's a medical situation in which you have two people and there is a significant danger of death to both of them, then a treatment that will result in the death of one but the life of the other might be ethically right in certain circumstances.

Look at conjoined twins. I'm sure there have been cases where surgeons and parents are forced to choose which twin gets to die and which gets to live, if either of them.

Yep. That happenes, when they're sharing vital organs or are ocnjoined in an unfortunate place. Often times they aren't big enough to support two children and they can either kill one twin or watch them both die.