lundi 28 octobre 2013

My recent thoughts about the abortion debate

According to the NHS website abortion is legal in the UK until 24 weeks of pregnancy, and only in more rare circumstances after that.



Most pro-choice people say things such as "I'm fighting for the rights of women to choose what to do with her body!". This is stating their logical position is that choice of a womans control over her body is the basis for their defence of abortion. However to be consistent in this they are required to defend abortion so long as the baby is inside the womans body. Most pro-choice people in my experience do not go this far due to the more tricky ethical dilemma of defending the idea that it should be illegal and wrong to kill a baby that was born pre-maturely, but not illegal even if its older so long as it is still within the mothers body. They would also have to accept that it should be fully legal for a scenario like a woman intentionally killing her own baby in the maternity ward so long as she hasn't given birth yet.



So for me most pro-choice peoples rhetoric about "fighting for the rights of women to choose what to do with her body" is basically completely hollow. You can't decide that a woman can choose what she can do with her own body, but only until X number of weeks and then she can't. If the answer is that there is now a human there with its own right to life, then you have to accept that this was always the basis for your acceptance of abortion and that a womans "right to do what she wants to her own body" really had nothing whatsoever to do with it. The line where they decide that it now has rights to life is arbitrary, and this is true whether its inside or outside the womans body.



And thats the irony really, because pro-lifers are against abortion simply because they draw their line right at the start of pregnancy, before that they're totally fine with killing sperms and eggs. On the other hand most pro-choice people will become pro-life after a certain number of weeks of pregnancy.



Whats even more crazy is when you realise that when asked most pro-lifers prove they actually see things essentially exactly the same way as the pro-choice people do, even the ones who scream that its murder. This is in the sense that if its murder they should see no difference in a woman taking the morning after pill, having an abortion after a week, and smothering a baby in its crib. Yet when you ask them what they think the punishment should be for a woman who aborts a pregnancy, to be consistent they should say its all the same, but they dont. You usually will find them totally bewildered as they probably havent even thought about it, and then often even say they dont believe they should put the women in prison at all and they should be given counselling. So someone that claims to believe that a soul is created at conception and therefore killing it is murder still almost always recognises that its not as bad to abort a pregnancy the further back in gestation you go, and that as the baby develops the more troubling and unethical it gets. That "its murder!" can still be recognised as being so different to actually murdering a baby, that "counselling" is the extent of the legal punishment many believe should happen to someone that they claim to believe "murdered" their child.



As far as I can tell the only logical thing to do is to accept that abortion laws are always going to be based on this arbitrary line drawn in the sand no matter what. Thats its not about the womans choices, its only about where we draw the line as to when we give the growing human rights. If possible we should try and use science to tell us a certain amount of information about how developed the babies consciousness is at a certain point. But even then, you still have to make an arbitrary call on when to say this stage of development now deserves protection.





via JREF Forum http://forums.randi.org/showthread.php?t=267660&goto=newpost

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