How would you respond to this argument?

[wynnejj]

The OP goes along with the idea that “You can’t legislate morality” camp. My answer is a challenge. Take off all your clothes and walk down the street in “your birthday suit” with your sign. Obviously, we legislate morality all the time.

When a person decides to commit murder, you can bet it is both a personal decision AND a legislative / enforcement matter.

 

[sedonaman]

… Obviously, we legislate morality all the time.
…

In fact, we cannot legislate anything else.

 

[wynnejj]

We in the pro-life movement need to do a better job of pursuing person-hood status for the fetus. A fetus is just as much of a person as I am, just as much of a person as a one-day old baby. Declaring person-hood at any other point than conception is subjective and random. We would never say it’s a personal decision to kill a one-day-old baby. It’s not a personal decision to kill a person. I’ve been in several abortion debates with friends and family. I always ask them when does person-hood begin. I hold them to this question and don’t let them diverge to something else. In my experience, no one has ever been able to reasonably answer this question with anything other than person-hood beginning at conception.

We win this argument on logic.

To many who do not believe in Jesus, we lose the fight on the argument that a human being has rights when he becomes a person. A person has personality and has brain & pain centers in their view. Before then, the human being in the fetal stage is the property of the mother.

We need to stress that the rights of man are in force as soon as it is a human being, regardless of the relativistic definition of when a human being becomes a “person”.

The Roman Missal, 3rd edition, corrects the Nicene Creed which in our previous Mass liturgy suggested Jesus was born and became man. The correction says what it used to always say… was INCARNATE and became man. That is, Jesus became man at the point of conception, not birth.

Pro-Life efforts should preach to all Christians that Jesus became our brother when the Word was made Flesh, not Christmas day. Christians must unite on this point and “legislate morality”, recognizing the least of our brethren from the point of incarnation, not some arbitrary “person” argument.

 

[ACCT]

The direct killing of innocent babies is always a grave injustice. We should not permit unjust killing any more than we should permit other injustices, such as slavery. Recognizing that abortion is an injustice requires us to work to overcome that injustice. Catholics have a grave moral obligation to defend all human life from conception to natural death.

 

[fix]

Thought_Officer:

It’s a personal decision because

1. It is somewhat arbitrary at which point a developing cluster of cells and tissues is something distinctly human. Some people will say “When it looks human;” others might say “When there’s a heartbeat,” or even more arbitrarily “When sufficient neural activity is taking place.” There are no clear markers about which, if any of these, will constitute human life for the individual. There seems not to be a pre-written way in which we can make that determination, and so individuals decide for themselves.

I would say claiming anything other than conception is arbitrary.

1. It is not considered a legal matter because, even if we call a fetus a human being, and even if we grant its right to exist–that right cannot supersede the right of the mother, whose body is the hosting grounds for the fetus. As long as the fetus requires the womb for survival, we can’t really legislate what a woman does with her body. Again, arbitrarily, we don’t make this distinction for a newborn, who we all agree is clearly distinct from the mother’s body.

We legislate what we can do with our bodies all the time. Aside from that your position is hard to defend. The baby is growing where babies grow. That does not mean the woman has a “right” to harm the child.

 

[ACCT]

Thought_Officer:

It’s a personal decision because

1. It is somewhat arbitrary at which point a developing cluster of cells and tissues is something distinctly human. Some people will say “When it looks human;” others might say “When there’s a heartbeat,” or even more arbitrarily “When sufficient neural activity is taking place.” There are no clear markers about which, if any of these, will constitute human life for the individual. There seems not to be a pre-written way in which we can make that determination, and so individuals decide for themselves.

I would first address the issue of whether or not a life is being taken during abortion.
After you have established a position on this affirming that indeed, abortion kills humans, you will then be ready to take on more specific situations including rape, incest, etc.

Personally, the most scientific and logical argument for the life present in a mother’s womb is the following:
• When an egg is fertilized by sperm, the two gametic cells become a zygote containing a genetic code completely different from that of the mother or father.
• This zygote at that moment is in every sense of the word, “alive.” It is undergoing the necessary metabolic processes needed to sustain life.
• By removing the zygote or the cells that the zygote transforms into during embryonic growth, a human life is terminated.

To address the more complicated issues that pro-choice advocates are likely to bring up, I pose the question: Is it ever acceptable to kill another human?
(Of course exceptions, usually involving self-preservation come up.)
If there are no issues with this question, you can easily justify Catholic teaching–intentional abortion is unacceptable, but in cases where a mother risks an embryo/fetus’s life to preserve her own (especially if the mother has other living children), any resulting abortion is not sinful.

It is important to recognize the gravity of situations in which rape have occurred. Still, going back to the question of whether it is acceptable to kill another human-- you may argue that a living human should never be punished for the crimes of its parents.

(My personal position on the morning after pill is not well defined because it is unclear whether it may aborts fertilized cells or if it only prevents the cells from being fertilized. Still, the risk of taking a life is too great for me to condone its usage.)

 

[fix]

Thought_Officer:

My personal mark of ‘arbitrary’ is before the second trimester, but I’m not Catholic, so it’s easy to see how we can differ on that point. The fact that you and I (presumably two intelligent people) can vary on that in away that we couldn’t vary on whether something is red or blue, is what makes the issue arbitrary.

We know life starts at conception, that is not faith but science. What is your proof that the life begins at some other point?

It’s not that difficult a position to defend. We legislate what we can do with our bodies insofar as we’re not harming ourselves or others. The debate tends to hinge over whether a fetus (not baby, by the way) is really an “other,” since it is not occupying a distinct space from the mother–since it truely is, for the time being, part of the mother.

Did the baby insert themselves there by their own power? The baby gestates as humans do. That does not axiomatically mean a woman has the authority to harm the child.

And if the fetus is an “other,” some have framed the problem this way: The fetus has a right to live, but in so doing, does not avail itself the right to use someone else’s body in the process thereof.

Again, that baby is doing nothing except living and growing. That is nature. The baby is not using someone else’s body as if the baby suddenly took over a foreign land.

 

[ACCT]

Thought_Officer:

It’s a personal decision because

1. It is not considered a legal matter because, even if we call a fetus a human being, and even if we grant its right to exist–that right cannot supersede the right of the mother, whose body is the hosting grounds for the fetus. As long as the fetus requires the womb for survival, we can’t really legislate what a woman does with her body. Again, arbitrarily, we don’t make this distinction for a newborn, who we all agree is clearly distinct from the mother’s body.

What is more fundamental than life itself?

There is another aspect of Roe vs. Wade that we did not discuss: the power of government to tell us who is and who is not a person. When some of you say that the government should not be involved in the abortion decision, I agree. However, I agree from a different perspective. The government got too involved in 1973 when it said that an unborn child is not a person. That decision by the Supreme Court was clearly an invalid and illegal decision of the Supreme Court. The world has been down this slippery slope of “non-persons” before.

Could the government ever declare us to be “non-persons?” That idea is not so far fetched as it sounds. I do not think that we have considered the full implication of Roe vs. Wade.

I do not know about you guys, but I started to exist about 9 months before I was born. I was not a possibility that “COULD become a child.” I was an actual child who had a body.

ANY CIVIL LAW IN TRANSGRESSION OF DIVINE LAW IS INVALID! An unjust law is no law at all! Such laws are to be defied because they do not exist. There is no basis for them.

There is Divine Law, Natural Law and Civil Law, in that order. Man only has control over civil law. Each type of law is separate and you cannot substitute one type of law for another type of law. Therefore, Roe versus Wade is an invalid law and is not worth the paper on which it was written.

“Abortion and euthanasia are thus crimes which no human law can claim to legitimize. There is no obligation in conscience to obey such laws; instead there is a grave and clear obligation to oppose them by conscientious objection (Pope John Paul II).

 

[wynnejj]

Thought_Officer:

1. It is not considered a legal matter because, even if we call a fetus a human being, and even if we grant its right to exist–that right cannot supersede the right of the mother, whose body is the hosting grounds for the fetus. As long as the fetus requires the womb for survival, we can’t really legislate what a woman does with her body. Again, arbitrarily, we don’t make this distinction for a newborn, who we all agree is clearly distinct from the mother’s body.

So the mother decides to have the baby, but the baby suffers from cholic and cries incessantly. So she puts the baby outside in the cold because it is her house and she should have the right to set the rules for her house. No mother has the right to abandon or abrogate her responsibility to her child!

And more importantly and to the point of the abortion debate…
Society should not allow enterprises that act as a trash facility for disposing and killing unwanted children.

Besides, your logic is a little tough on siamese twins and provides no clear solution to whose body has the right to destroy the other.

 

[sedonaman]

The so-called “right to choose” has led to the destruction of over 50 million unborn and has led to such practices as the “Two Minus One Pregnancy” visionandvalues.org/2011/08/abortion-s-slippery-slope-the-two-minus-one-pregnancy , the practice of aborting one twin by injecting potassium chloride into its heart. When asked which one to abort, the woman typically asks the doctor to “use some kind of chance procedure to pick the loser, so she doesn’t have to. In such cases, it is usually the one who unfortunately finds itself closer to the needle.”

 

[fix]

Thought_Officer:

We take life all the time (plant, animal, skin cells, whathaveyou). This debate hinges, not on whether the growing tissue inside the womb is life, but whether it’s something we can call human. That is what is arbitrary. That’s what science can’t comment on since people will define being human in different ways (having a heartbeat, having a brain, having a nervous system, being able to function outside a womb, etc.)

It cannot be anything but human. That is science. It is never a grape, or a fish, or a tree. It is always a human. That some people are confused about what a human is does not mean we cannot know with certainty the baby is human.

Well, it’s not a child yet, by the way, or a baby. When you say “harm the child,” you’re smuggling in the premise that you’re doing more than harming tissues and unsophisticated material. It doesn’t axiomatically mean anything–unless you first assume this material is something you call human–the very thing I’m saying is arbitrary.

If it is not a child then what is it? To claim it is not a baby is disingenuous.

It is not arbitrary at all. The only way this discussion could include the term arbitrary is if we started claiming a pregnant women has some object in her that is not a baby.

the fetus doesn’t have to be using the body as in the form of an invasion for it to be a parasitic relationship, as crude as it may seem to frame it in that light. And it doesn’t change the rights of the woman just because it’s not hostile like an invasion.

But it is not a parasite unless we change the meaning of words.

 

[wynnejj]

Thought_Officer:

Well, it’s certainly life of some sort (it’s dynamic, moving, growing matter). But is human? That’s precisely the thing I’m saying is arbitrary.

We take life all the time (plant, animal, skin cells, whathaveyou). This debate hinges, not on whether the growing tissue inside the womb is life, but whether it’s something we can call human. That is what is arbitrary. That’s what science can’t comment on since people will define being human in different ways (having a heartbeat, having a brain, having a nervous system, being able to function outside a womb, etc.)

Well, it’s not a child yet, by the way, or a baby. When you say “harm the child,” you’re smuggling in the premise that you’re doing more than harming tissues and unsophisticated material. It doesn’t axiomatically mean anything–unless you first assume this material is something you call human–the very thing I’m saying is arbitrary.

the fetus doesn’t have to be using the body as in the form of an invasion for it to be a parasitic relationship, as crude as it may seem to frame it in that light. And it doesn’t change the rights of the woman just because it’s not hostile like an invasion.

To frame it in this light IS crude, not seems crude, in that it frames the fetus, not as a human being but as a foreign entity…

A parasite is an organism of a different species. The fetus, a human being in that it is of human matter & exists, is flesh of the mother & father, a distinct human being as different from the father as the mother and as different from the mother as the father, who IS NOT a foreign entity, let alone a parasitic entity.

Besides, the legislative aspects of the abortion debate are whether abortion mills ought to be outlawed and, little to do with what a woman might do to induce an abortion privately.

This argument of “this is my body” opens the door to rationalize suicide assistance facilities, where a teenager who just had a row with family & friends decides to check-in at a facility to check-out of life.

The religious argument is that it is not your body, but a temple of the Lord. In a democracy, religious conviction should always inform and affect our political activism. The personal decision is clear - either legislate moral laws or legislate immoral laws.

 

[fix]

Thought_Officer:

An embryo with a human genotype is going to develop into a human–to be sure. But you would be surprised how much a human embryo looks like that of other animal species in its early interuterine stages (even like newts, reptiles, and fish).

That really has nothing to do with the fact the developing baby is always human.

A “human” embryo is really just an undifferentiated animal, at least for a little while. Anatomical differences don’t allow for the designation of human, even though it’s certain the genetic material will eventually form one.

What animal develops in a mother other than a human?

I tend to reserve the term baby for something that’s born. It just makes for more precise language.

Not really. Using scientific terms is often a ploy to devalue the baby.

The material inside a woman’s womb, in the early stages of pregnancy, lacks the type of differentiation needed to be called “human.” The object in a pregnant woman, then, is decidedly not a baby.

That is certainly an arbitrary conclusion. How much differentiation is required before you deem a human to be a human?

Not at all. All parasite means is an organism that utilizes the resources of another without contributing resources of its own.

A parasitic relationship is one that exists between members of two different species. The relationship between a mother and her offspring is a maternal relationship, which is neither mutualism, commensalism, nor parasitism.

 

[sw85]

Thought_Officer:

It’s a personal decision because

1. It is somewhat arbitrary at which point a developing cluster of cells and tissues is something distinctly human. Some people will say “When it looks human;” others might say “When there’s a heartbeat,” or even more arbitrarily “When sufficient neural activity is taking place.” There are no clear markers about which, if any of these, will constitute human life for the individual. There seems not to be a pre-written way in which we can make that determination, and so individuals decide for themselves.
2. It is not considered a legal matter because, even if we call a fetus a human being, and even if we grant its right to exist–that right cannot supersede the right of the mother, whose body is the hosting grounds for the fetus. As long as the fetus requires the womb for survival, we can’t really legislate what a woman does with her body. Again, arbitrarily, we don’t make this distinction for a newborn, who we all agree is clearly distinct from the mother’s body.

1. It’s no more arbitrary to say that a “cluster of cells and tissues” we call a fetus is a human than it is to say that the “cluster of cells and tissues” we call an adult is a human. All that matters is that it is human – and it is, which is why it always grows into an adult human and not an adult dog or an adult carrott. The fact of its being human makes it an object of our duty not to commit murder; therefore, it has the right to live.
2. We legislate what people can do with their bodies, like, all the time. For instance, I’m a strong guy who is forbidden by the law from using my strong body to kill and rape and rob people. Is that unjust?

Are you actually endorsing these arguments? I get the sense that you’re not, because you use the word “arbitrary” more than once, and most people don’t think arbitrariness is a strength.

 

[fix]

Thought_Officer:

It certainly will be a human, yes.

So at some point you were not human? What were you at such a point?

An undifferentiated one.

So a non human one?

I’m using the terms to distinguish between stages of development, not to devalue.

At what stage is a human not a human?

Yes! This is exactly my point and question.

I gave you the answer. Any point other than conception is arbitrary.

That is one definition, yup.

That is the definition. I know people like to attempt to change the meaning of words to control the debate, but really a human baby is not a parasite. Not scientifically and not morally.

 

[fix]

1. It’s no more arbitrary to say that a “cluster of cells and tissues” we call a fetus is a human than it is to say that the “cluster of cells and tissues” we call an adult is a human. All that matters is that it is human – and it is, which is why it always grows into an adult human and not an adult dog or an adult carrott.

Yes, that is the point. If differentiation is the one defining characteristic then we can “redefine” that at any point along the way including long after birth.

 

[fix]

Thought_Officer:

Undifferentiated material, as I said.

But, what does that mean? A 4 year old is different than a 30 year old. Is the 4 year old less human?

Anatomically, yes.

That would mean people missing certain body parts are less human.

I have already suggested that the answer to this question is arbitrary, since people answer it differently.

So your position is that because some people offer different answers there is no correct answer?

And you see we have different answers. And people draw that line at all places on the continuum.

Yes, people hold many erroneous views. But the point I am making is not a personal opinion. If you hold that it is arbitrary then we can decide that a 2 year old is not human.

I gave you the definition I was using from the dictionary. We can probably suspend this part of the dialogue.

I gave the definition from a popular science textbook.

 

[rlg94086]

Thought_Officer:

Well, it’s certainly life of some sort (it’s dynamic, moving, growing matter). But is human? That’s precisely the thing I’m saying is arbitrary.

Arbitrary? It’s scientific. Is it a living being? Yes. Is its DNA human? Yes. Ergo, it’s a living, human being.

Why do you deny science?

 

[fix]

Thought_Officer:

Sure we can, and some people do. Most people don’t value that though.

Are you saying that majority opinion is what determines what is true?

Differentiation (anatomically), distinction (space, body, and resources that are separate from mother), personhood (awareness and consciousness), and having been born: these are all reasons that people designate the category “human” more easily to adults than to fetuses. You may consider that shabby grounds for designation, but people make that call on arbitrary grounds. Hence, my argument.

But we are not asking you what many unreflective people hold as true. We are asking what is true? Through out history people in power have abused others based on the distinctions you mention. I am not looking for some sociological survey.

 

[fix]

Thought_Officer:

DNA doesn’t immediately make you human; the expression of the DNA does. And that expression remains undifferentiated in the early interuterine stages. Science.

Undifferentiated does not equal non human. It simply characterizes stages of development.