EPTOh and yeah, I'd say real life in many areas is that easy, to use your word. Lines are drawn for how 'things should fit in' in plenty, plenty, plenty of areas!
Related to abortion... When does life start? - Page 2
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FallDownMarigold
United States3710 Posts
Oh and yeah, I'd say real life in many areas is that easy, to use your word. Lines are drawn for how 'things should fit in' in plenty, plenty, plenty of areas! | ||
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HardlyNever
United States1258 Posts
Now, we can try to get into a concept of life as defined by "levels of consciousness" (which, conveniently, humans will always place themselves at the top of), but we are really just getting into very unknown territory. We can try to conflate consciousness with intelligence (i.e. more "intelligent" species have more "consciousness"), but I don't think that is an acceptable definition of consciousness (imo). We also have to address the fact that less than 100 years ago, we (as a species) wouldn't admit to animals even having intelligence, even though it is painfully obvious that isn't true at all. So how do we determine what "consciousness" an organism has? A fly certainly has some form of consciousness, is their life worth legally protecting? What about bacteria? Where do we draw the line? And more importantly why do we draw the line there? There is no hard, concrete, scientific place where you can say "life begins here." That is why this debate is constantly going, constantly changing, and constantly being kicked around as a political football. The problem is, if we move the bar too far in any one direction on the spectrum of life (regarding what is consciousness worth protecting), life for humans becomes absolutely un-livable; either we don't protect any life and start killing each other, or we protect all life and die off because it is impossible for human beings to continue living without ending the life of another organism. I know you said your question wasn't specifically about human life, so I left it that broad. However, most of what I said can be applied to human life and abortion specifically. Somewhere, a group of people have decided that some particular, arbitrary level of consciousness now constitutes human life (and nothing before that), and now it is no longer legal to abort that life. If you are looking for a satisfying, scientific explanation to why that is, you probably won't find one (I know I haven't). Of course, some arguments will be more convincing than others. | ||
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N.geNuity
United States5112 Posts
On April 24 2013 01:37 wherebugsgo wrote: It's not really a scientific question. When does human life "start" is more a political question than anything else. In order to make effective legislation we need to draw a line somewhere. For legal purposes the best line to draw is birth. Life starts at birth-this solves most of the "problems" related to the legality of abortion. eh birth is a little late for abortion issues I think; things like murder or manslaughter charges or whatever birth is probably okay as a metric. I think looking past the first trimester is a good way to "draw the line" for abortions. Before that, clinical abortion rates is about half the miscarry rate (clinical abortion maybe ~8% in US, and miscarry rate is ~15-20% among women who know they are pregnant. Miscarraige rates drop off rapidly after first trimester. I posted this in the past about abortion on a different forum, so I'll copy paste: the fetal development only begins about 10 weeks after the last menstrual period (LMP). There are varying estimates of how many miscarriages (or "spontaneous abortions" that seems to be the medical term), but it's pretty high it seems going towards the 6 week LMP (NIH says as much as 50% of all fertilized eggs, with 15-20% among women who know they are pregnant have miscarriages. I.e. many fertilized eggs never really get past a couple days and a significant number of women miscarry). Considering this, it seems perfectly reasonable to try to argue that first trimester abortions (12 week gestation) is pretty much when the miscarriage rate begins to rapidly drop off/becomes very rare, from the data that I can look up. Now that doesn't get into arguments about sentience etc, but the fetus hasn't begin its full development in the first trimester where miscarriages are common enough (with most abortions happening before/near 10 week) abortion isn't ideal, but having abortion be "safe and rare" in the first trimester doesn't seem fundamentally morally objectionable (clinical abortion rate, i.e. past 6 week, is 8% of pregnancies according to one really quick source) if you compare it to the natural miscarry rate. The goal, in my mind, can be to try to minimize abortions while allowing for the rare but safely done (no back-alley) for women in the mid-to-later first trimester. If the abortion rate was around, say, 4% of all pregnancies, that's a good 20-27% (4% of total) compared to 15-20% of women who miscarry and know they are pregnant (where all abortions know they are pregnant, I assume). | ||
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Sara Angelou
1 Post
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