Thoughts?

person-hood defined by the decision of the mother to keep/notkeep

i'm fine with that i suppose

Personhood is so messy... I don't think it's clear a mother should have a right to determine when and if another life, even one growing within her, is an independent life.

And, when would she decide? When it's time to decide whether to press charges? What if she didn't even know she was pregnant?

Obviously this guy should be in trouble, but how much trouble is hard to say. I definitely think it's something less than killing someone who was born. Maybe this fetus wasn't even going to make it.

This post was edited by N1ccolo on May 17 2013 11:58pm

no one has the right to force a woman to go through an unwanted pregnancy
no one has the right to force a woman to abort a baby she wants to have

infanticide is rare but natural amongst animals and humans are no exception

religious whackjobs that require a holy book to tell them killing is bad shouldn't be allowed to weigh in on these discussions as if they're offering a rational argument

This post was edited by duffman316 on May 18 2013 12:09am

This case really pokes holes in abortions, LOL

This post was edited by killgoreisleet on May 18 2013 12:17am

Yet societies do have the right to force people not to kill other people. My trouble is that I can't see a particular point in development at which we should grant personhood -- wherever that point is, it's not going to be okay to kill it. If the point is birth, is that not arbitrary given that it's almost entirely at the same stage of development within a week of birth? Then if we consider conception, it's merely a tiny bundle of cells that is probably going to die on it's own well before becoming anything resembling a child -- calling that a person seems like nonsense, and it's not as if sperm cells and egg cells are not alive before fertilization.

I'm pushed from both ends, but any particular point in between that I've thought about seems no less arbitrary -- if the criterion is viability, it's going to be at the mercy of medical technology and availability of that technology, leading to highly situational definitions. If the criterion is the potential of the thing to become a person, we'd need to consider anyone that is not at all times working on getting pregnant to be preventing human life that could exist from existing. Neither of these seems less arbitrary.

I essentially agree with a third-trimester prohibition, not because it's less arbitrary, but because it does at least give a woman plenty of time to make a decision without getting into either of the extremes that I can't justify.



Then why not legalize infanticide after birth? Hell, forget that, are you giving me an argument to nature to govern human morality? Should the men start offing their sexual rivals and become polygamist rapists too? That's no ground for an argument.



Whatever, I can't defend every idiot making an irrational point, but I have absolutely no religious motivation for thinking it's unclear, and an argument that is rational as far as I can tell. Most of these arguments are considered in Carl Sagan's essay on the subject:

http://2think.org/abortion.shtml

Politically I come to his position, third trimester prohibition is still arbitrary, but it dodges most of the thorny issues -- and it's very, very rare that it would occur this late anyway.

This post was edited by N1ccolo on May 18 2013 03:02am

Here's a hypothetical situation:

Karen, a devout Christian, is pregnant, but she is not very far along and she doesn't know it yet. Karen gets inured in a car accident with Bob. Bob is the driver at fault for the accident. While in the hospital recovering from her injuries, and there the doctors discover that she had been pregnant but lost the fetus as a result of the accident. The state tries to charge Bob with manslaughter. Bob's lawyers argue that the prosecution can not prove there was any "intent to keep" the baby, so there was no life. Prosecutors could just as easily argue that the defense can't prove there was any "intent to abort". The prosecution produces an anti-abortion message Karen posted on Facebook two years earlier, citing it as evidence of her intent. Karen's family and friends also testify that she has always strongly believed against abortion, so she would have definitely wanted to keep the baby.

Did Bob commit manslaughter?

This post was edited by kayeto on May 18 2013 05:10am

Yes.

Murder.

Just one thing here, the double standard, had the man wanted to keep the child and the mother aborted it, he would just have to suck it up.