Should all religious-equivalent laws be struck down?

Discussion in 'Abortion' started by Levant, Jan 17, 2020.

  1. Meta777

    Meta777 Moderator Staff Member

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    I think we have to be careful there. To say that a life is terminated against its will implies that it has a will to begin with.
    And perhaps it can be argued that at some point a fetus does gain will... but at a minimum, something such as will,
    i.e. the will to live or the will to choose, such things at the least require consciousness via a functioning brain.
    So we have to be careful. We shouldn't simply say that any potential being has a will or would choose to be born.
    Sure, you or I, as conscious beings, can say we're happy to be alive, but prior to consciousness there is no way we could have.

    If we don't want debates such as the abortion debate to be based on religion (as we shouldn't)
    then we should do what we can to ensure it is based on scientific evidence instead.
    So when does consciousness begin? That then becomes the key question.

    -Meta
     
  2. Levant

    Levant Well-Known Member Past Donor

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    And until we know we must certainly err on the side of caution. Prove there's no pain, prove there's no humanity, prove there's no thought. Prove it absolutely, even beyond a shadow of a doubt, because when there's any possibility, any at all, then that life must be protected.
     
  3. Meta777

    Meta777 Moderator Staff Member

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    And it is a question with an answer...


    The question of Abortion is one of morality. More specifically... the question is about balancing the morality of defending the defenseless from suffering against the morality of allowing people to have individual autonomy. In other words, while being a question of morality, there are clearly two contrasting sides to that question. That should not be forgotten.

    ...<snip>...

    And as a practical matter in general, I don't believe that people should be allowed to do whatever they want. But as both a practical and a moral matter I also believe that people should not be prevented from doing whatever they want, as long as what they're doing is not inflicting harm or infringing upon the individual autonomy of another. And I think it is perfectly moral, with few exceptions, to take away a bit of one person's individual autonomy in order to protect another person from suffering, especially if the first person is the cause of that suffering. That goes the same for the abortion debate... and whether or not the suffering individual is inside or outside of a uterus really doesn't matter all that much to me.

    Though that said, the question of protecting a fetus from suffering completely ceases to be a factor in things if the fetus is incapable of suffering. I basically go by the golden rule here, if I was a defenseless fetus, I'd definitely want someone out there to protect me from suffering. But if I did not yet have a brain, I wouldn't care one way or the other, because... why would I? As a matter of fact, without a functioning brain, I wouldn't even be capable of caring... no more so than one who did not exist at all.

    And so we arrive at the crucial pivot point, the point after which it is moral to stop a fetus from being aborted, the point before which the practicality and morality of the individual autonomy of the mother should be given precedence. The question of when life itself begins is less important here. Life in fact exists from the start, and even before then depending on how you define it. More important to this discussion is when begins a specific kind of life, or what I like to call, Mental Life, Conscious Life, or just Consciousness and also a fetus's capacity for Pain Perception (not to be confused with nociception). Criteria which I use for determining at what point abortion goes from being morally inconsequential to immoral.

    ...<snip>...

    Luckily, the science indicates that Mental Life or Consciousness and Pain Perception are inseparably related. Making it easier to settle on a tight range of points within the gestational cycle for where to place any moral cutoff. So then... let's ask, when does a fetus become conscious? When does its Mental Life begin? How early in the development can a fetus feel pain?

    From the Journal of the American Medical Association:

    "...Pain perception requires conscious recognition or awareness of a noxious stimulus...Fetal awareness of noxious stimuli requires functional thalamocortical connections. Thalamocortical fibers begin appearing between 23 to 30 weeks’ gestational age, while electroencephalography suggests the capacity for functional pain perception in preterm neonates probably does not exist before 29 or 30 weeks."

    Based on this the upper bound for allowed abortion should be placed no higher than 29 weeks. And if we go with the idea that Thalamocortical fibers are necessary for pain perception, the lower bound should be no lower than 23 weeks.

    "...others have proposed that thalamocortical connections could also be established indirectly if thalamic afferents were to synapse on subplate neurons, which could synapse on cortical plate neurons.29 ...thalamic afferents begin to reach the somatosensory subplate at 18 weeks’ developmental age (20 weeks’ gestational age)16 and the visual subplate at 20 to 22 weeks’ gestational age.17 These afferents appear morphologically mature enough to synapse with subplate neurons,31 although no human study has shown that functional synapses exist between thalamic afferents and subplate neurons..."

    The above quote asserts a theory that while the fibers which are ultimately used for the transmittal of pain signals do not develop until latter in the cycle, pre-developmental 'afferents' may be capable, again in theory, of acting as stand-ins for those transmittal paths. I have seen no evidence or research to suggest that pain perception can occur any earlier, so the lower bound for an allowable abortion cutoff should be placed no lower than 20 weeks in the case that we want to be extra cautious. Of course, additional research in the field may change this assessment...

    "...Some investigators contend that EEG patterns denoting wakefulness indicate when consciousness is first possible.5,36 ... In preterm neonates, the earliest EEG pattern representing wakefulness appears around 30 weeks’ PCA.22,23" (or about 32 weeks gestational)

    This suggests consciousness isn't possible before the 32 week mark even in individuals who make it out of the uterus.
    With the previous upper bound for pain perception at 29 weeks though, and wanting to be on the safer side of things,
    I think its best to prioritize the observation of pain perception pathways and the structures needed for brain activity,
    as a criteria over the observation of brain activity or consciousness itself. If we however can see that the structures
    for consciousness are all in place at week 29, I think that would still act as a good potential cutoff point and reason.

    https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jama/fullarticle/201429

    Which leads me to these following suggestions for where the cutoff should be:

    -Thalamic Afferents (Week 20): Because its been theorized that connections between afferents may be capable of pain transmission
    -Thalamocortical Fibers (Week 23): Because a fetus cannot suffer feel or perceive pain without Thalamocortical Fibers
    -Thalamocortical Fibers (Week 29): Because a fetus cannot suffer feel or perceive pain without Functional Thalamocortical Fibers
    -Pain Perception Dvmnt (Week 23-29): Because a fetus cannot suffer feel or perceive pain without Functional Thalamocortical Fibers
    -Pain Perception Dvmnt (Week 20-29): Because this is the period in which a fetus develops the structures necessary for pain perception
    -Mental Life (Week 29): Because fetal consciousness cannot and has not been observed to occur before this point​

    http://www.politicalforum.com/index.php?goto/post&id=1069493763

    -Meta
     
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  4. Meta777

    Meta777 Moderator Staff Member

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    BTW, the above is what I think makes for the best cutoff justification,
    but others would contend that viability makes more sense.
    i.e. the point at which a fetus can survive outside of the womb.

    -Viability (Week 24): Because that's when a fetus is able to live outside the woman without artificial means​

    While I can definitely see the arguments for that as well. Morally speaking it isn't as solid in my opinion.
    Luckily though, it sort of becomes a moot point for me due to the fact that the gestational time-frame
    for both line up so perfectly. Or in other words... one might not agree on the justifications involved,
    but it doesn't matter so much if we can all still agree on what the ultimate stance should be.

    -Meta
     
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  5. Derideo_Te

    Derideo_Te Well-Known Member

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    Does a plant feel pain given that it does not have a nervous system and pain receptors?

    There are gestational stages when the nervous system and pain receptors develop.

    Prior to that stage there can be no perception of pain.

    Same applies to the development of the brain. It needs to reach a certain gestational stage for it to function. Self awareness is a post natal development usually around 15 to 24 months.

    The term "humanity" does not fit into this context.
     
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  6. tecoyah

    tecoyah Well-Known Member Past Donor

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    Prove it to who....YOU? That is not possible but, if the proof is meant for rational minds of biologists/science it is already proven.
    Then we also have the logical thought process:
    "
    Every one of us began from a dot. A fertilized egg is roughly the size of the period at the end of this sentence. The momentous meeting of sperm and egg generally occurs in one of the two fallopian tubes. One cell becomes two, two become four, and so on—an exponentiation of base-2 arithmetic. By the tenth day the fertilized egg has become a kind of hollow sphere wandering off to another realm: the womb. It destroys tissue in its path. It sucks blood from capillaries. It bathes itself in maternal blood, from which it extracts oxygen and nutrients. It establishes itself as a kind of parasite on the walls of the uterus.


    • By the third week, around the time of the first missed menstrual period, the forming embryo is about 2 millimeters long and is developing various body parts. Only at this stage does it begin to be dependent on a rudimentary placenta. It looks a little like a segmented worm.

    • By the end of the fourth week, it's about 5 millimeters (about 1/5 inch) long. It's recognizable now as a vertebrate, its tube-shaped heart is beginning to beat, something like the gill arches of a fish or an amphibian become conspicuous, and there is a pronounced tail. It looks rather like a newt or a tadpole. This is the end of the first month after conception.

    • By the fifth week, the gross divisions of the brain can be distinguished. What will later develop into eyes are apparent, and little buds appear—on their way to becoming arms and legs.

    • By the sixth week, the embryo is 13 millimeteres (about ½ inch) long. The eyes are still on the side of the head, as in most animals, and the reptilian face has connected slits where the mouth and nose eventually will be.

    • By the end of the seventh week, the tail is almost gone, and sexual characteristics can be discerned (although both sexes look female). The face is mammalian but somewhat piglike.

    • By the end of the eighth week, the face resembles that of a primate but is still not quite human. Most of the human body parts are present in their essentials. Some lower brain anatomy is well-developed. The fetus shows some reflex response to delicate stimulation.

    • By the tenth week, the face has an unmistakably human cast. It is beginning to be possible to distinguish males from females. Nails and major bone structures are not apparent until the third month.

    • By the fourth month, you can tell the face of one fetus from that of another. Quickening is most commonly felt in the fifth month. The bronchioles of the lungs do not begin developing until approximately the sixth month, the alveoli still later.
      So, if only a person can be murdered, when does the fetus attain personhood? When its face becomes distinctly human, near the end of the first trimester? When the fetus becomes responsive to stimuli--again, at the end of the first trimester? When it becomes active enough to be felt as quickening, typically in the middle of the second trimester? When the lungs have reached a stage of development sufficient that the fetus might, just conceivably, be able to breathe on its own in the outside air?

      The trouble with these particular developmental milestones is not just that they're arbitrary. More troubling is the fact that none of them involves uniquely humancharacteristics--apart from the superficial matter of facial appearance. All animals respond to stimuli and move of their own volition. Large numbers are able to breathe. But that doesn't stop us from slaughtering them by the billions. Reflexes and motion are not what make us human.

      Other animals have advantages over us--in speed, strength, endurance, climbing or burrowing skills, camouflage, sight or smell or hearing, mastery of the air or water. Our one great advantage, the secret of our success, is thought--characteristically human thought. We are able to think things through, imagine events yet to occur, figure things out. That's how we invented agriculture and civilization. Thought is our blessing and our curse, and it makes us who we are.

      Thinking occurs, of course, in the brain--principally in the top layers of the convoluted "gray matter" called the cerebral cortex. The roughly 100 billion neurons in the brain constitute the material basis of thought. The neurons are connected to each other, and their linkups play a major role in what we experience as thinking. But large-scale linking up of neurons doesn't begin until the 24th to 27th week of pregnancy--the sixth month.

      By placing harmless electrodes on a subject's head, scientists can measure the electrical activity produced by the network of neurons inside the skull. Different kinds of mental activity show different kinds of brain waves. But brain waves with regular patterns typical of adult human brains do not appear in the fetus until about the 30th week of pregnancy--near the beginning of the third trimester. Fetuses younger than this--however alive and active they may be--lack the necessary brain architecture. They cannot yet think.

      Acquiescing in the killing of any living creature, especially one that might later become a baby, is troublesome and painful. But we've rejected the extremes of "always" and "never," and this puts us--like it or not--on the slippery slope. If we are forced to choose a developmental criterion, then this is where we draw the line: when the beginning of characteristically human thinking becomes barely possible.

      It is, in fact, a very conservative definition: Regular brain waves are rarely found in fetuses. More research would help… If we wanted to make the criterion still more stringent, to allow for occasional precocious fetal brain development, we might draw the line at six months. This, it so happens, is where the Supreme Court drew it in 1973--although for completely different reasons.

      Its decision in the case of Roe v. Wade changed American law on abortion. It permits abortion at the request of the woman without restriction in the first trimester and, with some restrictions intended to protect her health, in the second trimester. It allows states to forbid abortion in the third trimester, except when there's a serious threat to the life or health of the woman. In the 1989 Webster decision, the Supreme Court declined explicitly to overturn Roe v. Wade but in effect invited the 50 state legislatures to decide for themselves.

      What was the reasoning in Roe v. Wade? There was no legal weight given to what happens to the children once they are born, or to the family. Instead, a woman's right to reproductive freedom is protected, the court ruled, by constitutional guarantees of privacy. But that right is not unqualified. The woman's guarantee of privacy and the fetus's right to life must be weighed--and when the court did the weighing' priority was given to privacy in the first trimester and to life in the third. The transition was decided not from any of the considerations we have been dealing with so far…--not when "ensoulment" occurs, not when the fetus takes on sufficient human characteristics to be protected by laws against murder. Instead, the criterion adopted was whether the fetus could live outside the mother. This is called "viability" and depends in part on the ability to breathe. The lungs are simply not developed, and the fetus cannot breathe--no matter how advanced an artificial lung it might be placed in—until about the 24th week, near the start of the sixth month. This is why Roe v. Wade permits the states to prohibit abortions in the last trimester. It's a very pragmatic criterion."
     
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  7. Derideo_Te

    Derideo_Te Well-Known Member

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    :applause:

    Excellent link that puts it all into the appropriate perspective!
     
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  8. CKW

    CKW Well-Known Member

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    Interesting assertion. Where does that data that creates your assertion come from?

    The people I know who wanted and who had abortions weren't Christian. Is there a survey question checked prior to an abortion that is tabulated somewhere?
     
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  9. Levant

    Levant Well-Known Member Past Donor

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    The viability argument is completely bogus. With that argument, the governor of Virginia is correct; the baby is not viable when born and putting it on the table. It will only live if someone intervenes and gives it food and water that it can not obtain on its own... Just like a baby at 21 weeks who did survive, even term babies need assistance to survive. Before 21 weeks, where our current medical technology cannot save a baby, is it OK to kill that baby as it has no ability to on its own, even with medical care?

    Then is it OK to kill those with diseases for which there is no cure and death from the diseases is certain? No matter what, they're going to die. Why waste time, money, and effort, trying to save them?

    Whether or not science should be doing this, this satirical article (that means fake for those of you who spent too much time studying Marx in school and not enough time studying language) a Russian laboratory is supposed to have created a baby from stem cells. Eventually, this is going to actually happen. Which means, eventually, there is no age of an unborn baby that cannot be saved with medical assistance. Which means that the only reason babies under 21 weeks of gestation are claimed to be unviable is not that they're really unviable but that our medical science doesn't have the means to save those babies. On the other hand, of course, human biology - credit it to whom or what you will - has the means to save those babies today.
     
  10. Levant

    Levant Well-Known Member Past Donor

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    And in that dot exists every single bit of life required to complete the development to an adult human being. Just as a newly born baby requires assistance to live and develop, and that the form of that newborn is not in a form that can live on its own, additional development being required, the dot of which you speak will, if permitted to live and barring some unexpected accident or illness (also as in the case of the newborn) will grow up to be an adult human being.
     
  11. tecoyah

    tecoyah Well-Known Member Past Donor

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    So will my sperm given the right circumstances and nurture...that has no relevance.
     
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  12. Levant

    Levant Well-Known Member Past Donor

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    That's clearly not true. Your sperm does not have all that is necessary to become an adult human being. That's a ludicrous argument.
     
  13. tecoyah

    tecoyah Well-Known Member Past Donor

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    Given the right circumstances means sex....so does nurture, I guess subtlety has escaped you. Nevertheless, the jist of my point should be quite clear.....the possibility of a born human does not equate to a baby.
     
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  14. yabberefugee

    yabberefugee Well-Known Member Past Donor

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    There is a uterous inside that uterous (often times it is a girl) with her own blood type, her own DNA, and her own future that you would deny.
     
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  15. yabberefugee

    yabberefugee Well-Known Member Past Donor

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    What you are saying does not offend me at all, Meta. When you talk about "Religion"..... I think of Catholicism, Certain protestant denominations and organizations, you can even talk of non- Christian orgs, like Mormonism Islam Etc. All these have certain rules you follow to be part of those groups. How do you consider a person who just believes in God, seeks Him out, and develops certain convictions that may or may not conform to those organizations? Can they press forward and try to influence their leadership? I wouldn't say that is religious but there are millions of us that don't conform to any real religion. We just exercise our faith.
     
  16. Levant

    Levant Well-Known Member Past Donor

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    Atheism is a religion. Hatred for Christianity is a religion. True agnostics are rare.
     
  17. Levant

    Levant Well-Known Member Past Donor

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    By the way, I'm completely pro-choice.

    I think a woman absolutely should have complete choice in when, and with whom, she has sex. Unlike leftist criminal reformists who let rapists walk the streets, I believe rapists should be hung. But once a woman, of her own free will, exercises her free choice, and has sex, then she must accept the responsibility and consequences for her actions just as the man must when the child is born.
     
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  18. Meta777

    Meta777 Moderator Staff Member

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    So what's your opinion on this abortion reform compromise proposal then?

    http://www.politicalforum.com/index.php?threads/pf-abortion-reform-compromise.550627/
    -Meta
     
  19. Levant

    Levant Well-Known Member Past Donor

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    I think my view on abortion is pretty clear; it's always the wrong choice. My wife was told, with two of our three children, that if she carried them to term either she or the baby, possibly both, would die. She refused to even discuss killing her children; she and all three of our children are quite healthy 45 years later.

    How do you plan to make contraceptives more available? Taxpayers should not have to pay for the sexual behaviors of others. Contraceptives are very widely, virtually universally, available in most countries. Every drug store I go to, or even the pharmacy department at Walmart, has racks of condoms. The FDA could allow birth control pills with consult with the pharmacist rather than doctor's prescription, saving a bit of money... Beyond that, just how more available do you want them to be?

    Oh, there's another way to control pregnancy, as old as man or woman.
     
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  20. Derideo_Te

    Derideo_Te Well-Known Member

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    I was wondering when the pretense would be dropped!
     
  21. Derideo_Te

    Derideo_Te Well-Known Member

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    Confirmation of dropping the pretense!
     
  22. Derideo_Te

    Derideo_Te Well-Known Member

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    The pretense has disappeared entirely and this is now officially another anti-abortion thread with an OP who has clearly established a theist bias and an unwillingness to compromise.
     
  23. Meta777

    Meta777 Moderator Staff Member

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    Well like I was saying, I don't believe that viability is the best justification either.
    If you ask me, Pain Perception and or Mental Life/Consciousness ought to be the gold standards.
    Just a happy coincidence from my perspective that the ranges for those so closely coincide with the viability convention.

    -Meta
     
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  24. K9Buck

    K9Buck Well-Known Member

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    Would it be moral to euthanize someone in a coma as they are not "viable" to survive on their own?
     
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  25. Meta777

    Meta777 Moderator Staff Member

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    Well stated!
     
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