Hi, pro-choice mathematician who’s done biology work here.
Fetuses are alive. Fetuses are composed of living tissues. If a fetus was not alive, it wouldn’t grow. If a fetus doesn’t grow it can’t be born. You will never win an argument with an anti-abortion nutjob if you get basic facts wrong. The reason a fetus doesn’t have the same moral weight as the human it needs to live off of is because fetuses aren’t sapient.
Strongly recommend not using this argument, or any of the ones showing up in this sub-thread. No one is going to be convinced on any of this. The people trying to ban abortion will never, ever be convinced by arguments about when life begins – and will likely just become more certain that the pro choice crowd are full of callous monsters that don’t grant dignity to life.
Read A Defense of Abortion, Judith Jarvis. It is the argument.
In a nutshell: it doesn’t matter if the fetus is alive/a human/has a soul/whatever. You can grant that it is a full human being with rights from the beginning, even. Our ethical rules place autonomy of your own body hierarchically higher than preserving the life of someone else. That must be true or else it would be perfectly reasonable to harvest extra organs from people without their consent, take any or all property from citizens without cause to give to the needy, or draft individuals into whatever charitable work you wanted with no due process. There are very strict limits on how much charity a person can be mandated to participate in, and that limit is usually down to transient circumstances and taxes. It certainly does not dive into your flesh.
The state has no business enforcing control over decisions an individual makes about the contents of their own uterus, even if those decisions may lead to a death.
Whether or not it is RIGHT or GOOD to get an abortion doesn’t even matter and, frankly, isn’t worth debating. That is a subjective question. All that matters is whether the state is allowed to step in and prevent it from happening – and they aren’t.
The only thing marking a clear difference between a fetus and any other person is the fetus’s need of the womb to live. And unfortunately, one person’s need of some service to live is not sufficient to enslave another.
Arguments with unreasonable people aren’t won by making the unreasonable person change their mind they’re won by showing the audience that the person is unreasonable, which in turn shows their word can’t be trusted.
I don’t think any undecided audience will be convinced by this “mass of cells”-style argument either. But to someone who DOES worry that it is a ‘person’ being aborted, hearing someone else dismiss that life makes it seem like the pro-choice people are callous and uncaring.
If you’re arguing for an audience, all the more reason to be explicit and clear about the underlying ethical conviction rather than just a subjective opinion about what is and isn’t life. How this is about a person’s right to make the right choice for themselves, privately.
Either that or talk about the pain and hardship brought on by pregnancy, especially pregnancy caused by violence, and the benefit the abortion can provide. That can also be pretty compelling.
Hi, pro-choice mathematician who’s done biology work here. Fetuses are alive. Fetuses are composed of living tissues. If a fetus was not alive, it wouldn’t grow. If a fetus doesn’t grow it can’t be born. You will never win an argument with an anti-abortion nutjob if you get basic facts wrong. The reason a fetus doesn’t have the same moral weight as the human it needs to live off of is because fetuses aren’t sapient.
Strongly recommend not using this argument, or any of the ones showing up in this sub-thread. No one is going to be convinced on any of this. The people trying to ban abortion will never, ever be convinced by arguments about when life begins – and will likely just become more certain that the pro choice crowd are full of callous monsters that don’t grant dignity to life.
Read A Defense of Abortion, Judith Jarvis. It is the argument.
In a nutshell: it doesn’t matter if the fetus is alive/a human/has a soul/whatever. You can grant that it is a full human being with rights from the beginning, even. Our ethical rules place autonomy of your own body hierarchically higher than preserving the life of someone else. That must be true or else it would be perfectly reasonable to harvest extra organs from people without their consent, take any or all property from citizens without cause to give to the needy, or draft individuals into whatever charitable work you wanted with no due process. There are very strict limits on how much charity a person can be mandated to participate in, and that limit is usually down to transient circumstances and taxes. It certainly does not dive into your flesh.
The state has no business enforcing control over decisions an individual makes about the contents of their own uterus, even if those decisions may lead to a death.
Whether or not it is RIGHT or GOOD to get an abortion doesn’t even matter and, frankly, isn’t worth debating. That is a subjective question. All that matters is whether the state is allowed to step in and prevent it from happening – and they aren’t.
The only thing marking a clear difference between a fetus and any other person is the fetus’s need of the womb to live. And unfortunately, one person’s need of some service to live is not sufficient to enslave another.
Arguments with unreasonable people aren’t won by making the unreasonable person change their mind they’re won by showing the audience that the person is unreasonable, which in turn shows their word can’t be trusted.
I don’t think any undecided audience will be convinced by this “mass of cells”-style argument either. But to someone who DOES worry that it is a ‘person’ being aborted, hearing someone else dismiss that life makes it seem like the pro-choice people are callous and uncaring.
If you’re arguing for an audience, all the more reason to be explicit and clear about the underlying ethical conviction rather than just a subjective opinion about what is and isn’t life. How this is about a person’s right to make the right choice for themselves, privately.
Either that or talk about the pain and hardship brought on by pregnancy, especially pregnancy caused by violence, and the benefit the abortion can provide. That can also be pretty compelling.
You would have a hard time convincing me that a newborn was a sapient being.
I don’t see how that’s relevant to the point.