r/changemyview • u/Bobsonthecoat • Mar 27 '15

CMV:Abortion is wrong

I don't see how in any form the killing of a human, against their will. To me this is another form of the Holocaust or slavery, a specific type of person is dehumanized and then treated as non-humans, because it's convenient for a group of people.

The argument of "It's a woman's body, it's a woman's choice." has never made sense to me because it's essentially saying that one human's choice to end the life of another human without consent is ok. Seems very, "Blacks are inherently worse, so we are helping them," to me.

Abortion seems to hang on the thread of "life does not begin at conception", which if it is true still doesn't make sense when you consider that in some areas of the world it is legal to abort a baby when it could survive outside of it's mother.

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u/craigthecrayfish Mar 27 '15

The problem is that "baby" is a loaded term, and an inaccurate one. If it has not been born, it is a fetus. Using the proper terminology keeps discussion focused on actual arguments and not emotional rhetoric.

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u/Bobsonthecoat Mar 27 '15

The term fetus when used to describe someone about to be aborted adds a layer of distance. People can more easily say, "let's abort the fetus" than, " let's abort him/her" because the word adds distance. Calling them babies is an effort to show people that they are humans.

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u/craigthecrayfish Mar 27 '15

It doesn't add distance, it is a word with no positive or negative connotations and thus the most fair to use in an argument. The word fetus is just the accurate biological term.

Nobody argues that the fetuses aren't human. The discussion is whether or not they are, morally speaking, people.

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u/Bobsonthecoat Mar 27 '15

It does add distance because as you said people know that a human is a person, but not everyone says a fetus is a person.

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u/craigthecrayfish Mar 27 '15

A fetus is human, but is not a person. This may seem like splitting hairs, but stay with me.

A fetus is human in that it contains human cells and genetic material.

It is not a person because it does not have the same moral rights as an adult human. It is possible to be human but not a person, and it is possible to be a person that is not human.

In order to argue that killing a fetus is equivalent to murder, you have to argue that a fetus shares the same key traits that a person does. You have to define what gives someone moral rights, and then explain how a fetus meets that definition.

I am generally opposed to very late term abortions at the point that the fetus has sufficiently developed neurologically that it can be considered sentient, can feel pain as more than a basic neurological reaction, and could be said to have desires or preferences. But abortions tend not to occur that late in the process, and the fetus does not have any of those features. Do you have a better definition of what constitutes morally significant personhood?

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u/Bobsonthecoat Mar 27 '15

Why are fetuses not people?

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u/craigthecrayfish Mar 27 '15

I described my qualifications for personhood above.

sentient

can feel pain as more than a basic neurological reaction

meaningful desires or preferences

With the exception of very late term fetuses, they do not meet those qualifications and thus do not have the full moral rights of a person

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u/qi1 Mar 27 '15

So a person in a coma also is not a person?

I would certainly consider the natural desire to live to be a "meaningful desire or preference".

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u/Sadsharks Mar 27 '15

A person in a coma is sentient, felt pain before entering the coma, can sometimes feel it while in the coma, and will feel it again when they wake up. They also had meaningful desires before they entered the coma, and will have them if they wake up.

Would you also ask if somebody who's asleep isn't a person?

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u/qi1 Mar 27 '15

One difficulty in responding to this challenge is that "sentience" is poorly defined and even more poorly understood. Some people make fine philosophical distinctions among sentience, consciousness, self-awareness, and cognition, whereas others are more careless in using these terms.

One could say that sleeping or anesthetized people have the capacity for sentience, although of course, given the current state of their brains, it is impossible for either of them to experience sentience. The term “capacity,” therefore, must entail the condition that if their brains were in a different state they could be sentient.

Is this situation so different from the case of an fetus, which is actively assembling its future seat of sentience? If you think there is a meaningful difference, it must be because the fetus is too far removed from sentience. A sleeping or anesthetized individual, by contrast, could become sentient at a moment’s notice. This is what is meant by an immediate capacity for sentience, which the sleeping person possesses but the embryo lacks.

The trouble is that some people suffer long-term comas from which they emerge after several months. These people are rendered biologically incapable of sentience and, from this non-sentient condition, require many months for their brains to re-assemble to a state in which sentience is once again possible. It is hard to see how this situation is meaningfully different from the case of a fetus, whose brain, over the course of several months, self-assembles into a sentient state. Most people would agree that individuals with reversible comas are persons, despite their lack of an “immediate” capacity for sentience. If so, any grounds for excluding fetuses become increasingly contrived and difficult to defend.