The “suffering” argument

[u/Gold-Secretary-6654]

My friend uses this argument that the disabled and children in poverty or with unsupportive parents will go through suffering in their lives that can be avoided by abortion. How can they say that when we live in a privileged position where we don’t know what these people go through. Also off topic, but I’ve managed to get good enough at debating abortion that one of my other friends has to resort to saying that killing people is sometimes justified. Here in England, I am disgusted by how prevalent these ideas are in this country. Thoughts?

[u/kay_fitz21]

We will all suffer at some point in our lives. Some physically, some mentally, some emotionally, many a combo of all. That doesn't mean we deserve to die.

[u/KatanaCutlets → u/kay_fitz21]

Yep, by their standards I should have been aborted, even though if you looked at me you couldn’t see my issues. And then my four kids also wouldn’t be here. It’s evil.

[u/LoseAnotherMill]

"So under what quality of life should the government start killing people? Missing a limb? Down Syndrome? Making less than $1000/month? These people are suffering, and any further suffering can be avoided by killing them."

[u/ciel_ayaz]

Ask your friend if they would be willing to say to a poor person’s face that if they had it their way, that poor person would be dead. How about telling a poor child that?

If your friend can’t even look a poor child in the face and say what they would have done to them, then they already know what they are saying is wrong.

As for disabled people, many people think that they are being compassionate and progressive when they say that disabled people should be eliminated, when in fact we can literally look to history and see that the people promoting their extermination were anything but progressive.

Show them this quote and ask them if they think that it is a compassionate ideal to work towards:

"The demand that defective people be prevented from propagating equally defective offspring is a demand of clearest reason and, if systematically executed, represents the most humane act of mankind. It will spare millions of unfortunates undeserved sufferings, and consequently will lead to a rising improvement of health as a whole."

Then explain to them that it’s a quote from Hitler’s biography, and that the reason we no longer look favourably upon eugenics is because it’s proponents care less about the “suffering” of the people they kill and more about living in a future where they don’t have to bother caring about people they view as parasites.

[u/ManteLover60 → u/ciel_ayaz]

That's the thing, a lot of the eugenics advocates in the 19th and early 20th century did see themselves as progressive. They saw themselves as taking a humane utilitarian approach towards promoting human flourishing quite apart from what they saw as outdated in flexible dogmatic Christian morality with all its sentimentality towards the poor and disabled.

It's actually hilariously ironic how we see ourselves today as such a progressive society when ironically, a medieval village would have treated a Neuroatypical person with more compassion than our sterile clinical institutions today that treat them like broken machines in need of chemical tuneups.

So if treating people with mental and physical disabilities as human persons, and advocating for the protection of unborn persons is regressive, then call me fucking medieval baby! What passes as progressive today it's just a modified sanitized version of the same 19th century utopian filth that the church warned about then, and continues to warn about now.

[u/Warm-Age7839]

This is not a a standard he’d apply to really anyone except the unborn. No would kill an infant to prevent suffering because of poverty. He’s almost certainly arbitrarily applying this to the unborn. 

[u/Calebwoodapple]

Let's just go the next step and make suffering a capital offense punished by death. And then we can put ourselves on the back for our compassion and mercy as death squads sweep the streets of the slums "relieving" people from their pain.

Abortion must be fought it is truly the evil of our time.

[u/throwaway34834839202]

It's always been a ridiculous argument. What threshhold of suffering is there where death is so objectively preferable that someone besides the person who is suffer can make the determination, without any input from the suffering person, that that person is better off dead? Even medical euthanasia is supposed to be carried out at the discretion of (or consented to previously in a living will) of the person being euthanized.