What word could use we use to describe the 53 million legal abortion unborn child killings in US since 1973

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Hokomai said:
Homo sapiens sapiens, possibly with a little homo (sapiens) neanderthalensis.

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The point is that it is not ‘life’ from which any rational argument against abortion begins, but ‘the existence of a human being’. Sperm and egg are human, and alive, as is the placenta. But they are not human beings.
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Well we have determined that they are part of the species homo sapiens.

What is the scientific distinction between being a living member of the species homo sapiens, and a human being?
 
Slaughter of the Innocents - but on an infinitely worse scale than anything Pharaoh or Herod could have dreamed up. 😦
 
Hokomai said:
Thanks Tarboy. I think any rational person will accept that a zygote, fetus or embryo is ‘life’, and is biologically human. This should be common ground between ‘choice’ and ‘life’. The next question is whether this human life has rights, and, if it does, what are they? If it has no rights, then obviously it has no right to life. If it has some rights, does this include a right to life, and is this right absolute (as in Catholic belief), or qualified (as in the belief of almost all other sources of moral thinking). Then, if it is qualified, by what is it qualified and to what extent is it qualified? In most legal systems the rights of the ‘unborn’ are qualified by the rights of others, such as the mother. In some cases this is ‘great’ rights such as the mother’s right to life, and in others ‘lesser’ rights, such as the convenience of the mother, or the ‘right’ to select the sex of the ‘unborn’. The Catholic view, on these continuums is extreme, as even the right of the mother to life cannot be used to justify a direct abortion. By ‘extreme’ I do not mean ‘wrong’, just that it is at the end of the spectrum. The OP, by seeking extreme language to describe abortion, fails to recognise that the Catholic view is already seen as extreme by others. By making the language more extreme, dialogue is blocked.
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Why should an adolescent or an infant have rights, while a fetus does not…? Are these not just different ages of human beings?

Why aren’t the rights of a newborn “qualified” by the rights of the mother the same as the fetus.
 
Hokomai said:
Thanks Tarboy. I think any rational person will accept that a zygote, fetus or embryo is ‘life’, and is biologically human. This should be common ground between ‘choice’ and ‘life’. The next question is whether this human life has rights, and, if it does, what are they? If it has no rights, then obviously it has no right to life. If it has some rights, does this include a right to life, and is this right absolute (as in Catholic belief), or qualified (as in the belief of almost all other sources of moral thinking). Then, if it is qualified, by what is it qualified and to what extent is it qualified? In most legal systems the rights of the ‘unborn’ are qualified by the rights of others, such as the mother. In some cases this is ‘great’ rights such as the mother’s right to life, and in others ‘lesser’ rights, such as the convenience of the mother, or the ‘right’ to select the sex of the ‘unborn’. The Catholic view, on these continuums is extreme, as even the right of the mother to life cannot be used to justify a direct abortion. By ‘extreme’ I do not mean ‘wrong’, just that it is at the end of the spectrum. The OP, by seeking extreme language to describe abortion, fails to recognise that the Catholic view is already seen as extreme by others. By making the language more extreme, dialogue is blocked.
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I want to see this debated…!! :bounce:

Let’s do it. 👍
 
Brendan said:
Well we have determined that they are part of the species homo sapiens.

What is the scientific distinction between being a living member of the species homo sapiens, and a human being?
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The issue I was addressing was ‘life’ not ‘being a living member’. “Life” does not begin at conception. Sperm and egg are alive. The Catholic view is that an individual human being appears at the moment of conception, that this human being is a person in the same sense that you or I are a people, and that it/she/he has the same rights. Many, if not most, other ethical traditions assign personhood at a later stage than conception. Even Catholicism once assigned it to the point of ‘quickening’, the first time at about 40 days the movement of the embryo can be felt by the mother. Earlier abortion was opposed by Catholicism but as a form of contraception, not as killing of a human being. The main distinction between a zygote, embryo or fetus and born human beings is exactly that: the latter are born. Humans place great cultural emphasis on birth and it is not surprising that there is broad agreement that a fetus, embryo or zygote prior to the possibility of independent life (birth) is typically regarded as a different type of human being, or as not a human being in the same sense as born people.
 
One word would be too confining to sum up all of the evil it has caused because of all the circumstances surrounding each one and who all was involved and how the woman came to be on that table. One word for me would be horror but that would just be mine.
 
Hokomai said:
The issue I was addressing was ‘life’ not ‘being a living member’. “Life” does not begin at conception. Sperm and egg are alive. The Catholic view is that an individual human being appears at the moment of conception, that this human being is a person in the same sense that you or I are a people, and that it/she/he has the same rights. Many, if not most, other ethical traditions assign personhood at a later stage than conception. Even Catholicism once assigned it to the point of ‘quickening’, the first time at about 40 days the movement of the embryo can be felt by the mother. Earlier abortion was opposed by Catholicism but as a form of contraception, not as killing of a human being. The main distinction between a zygote, embryo or fetus and born human beings is exactly that: the latter are born. Humans place great cultural emphasis on birth and it is not surprising that there is broad agreement that a fetus, embryo or zygote prior to the possibility of independent life (birth) is typically regarded as a different type of human being, or as not a human being in the same sense as born people.
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Sadly, you really have no argument up to this point. Just some very mild assertions that allow you to appear neutral. You know you CAN debate this and state your honest opinion without fear of being banned from CAF… 🤷

But I will say, independent life does not begin after birth as you claim others have stated. Newborns cannot survive naturally without their mothers bodily fluids (e.g. Breastmilk) anymore than the fetus. The two are equally dependent upon the mother.
 
TEPO said:
Sadly, you really have no argument up to this point. Just some very mild assertions that allow you to appear neutral. You know you CAN debate this and state your honest opinion without fear of being banned from CAF… 🤷

But I will say, independent life does not begin after birth as you claim others have stated. Newborns cannot survive naturally without their mothers bodily fluids (e.g. Breastmilk) anymore than the fetus. The two are equally dependent upon the mother.
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What I am talking about is the language used and the approach taken to the abortion debate. I don’t know what I have said to make you think anything else.
 
Hokomai said:
What I am talking about is the language used and the approach taken to the abortion debate. I don’t know what I have said to make you think anything else.
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I understand what you’re doing with the language and references on typical views and traditions… I was just hoping to squeeze some of your personal opinions out. I believe that you do have an opinion on this issue, and I want to understand it. I also know a lot of posters feel threatened to speak out against the pro-life stance on these forums… They shouldn’t.

There needs to be dialogue on the abortion issue, no matter how painful it is, but the only ones willing to make the argument are the pro-lifers… The pro-choicers want nothing to do with it -just as one would do who was trying to bury a guilty feeling. I think the pro-choicers may feel guilt.

Not insinuating at all that you are pro-choice… ;). (but I can’t help being curious)
 
TEPO said:
I understand what you’re doing with the language and references on typical views and traditions… I was just hoping to squeeze some of your personal opinions out. I believe that you do have an opinion on this issue, and I want to understand it. I also know a lot of posters feel threatened to speak out against the pro-life stance on these forums… They shouldn’t.

There needs to be dialogue on the abortion issue, no matter how painful it is, but the only ones willing to make the argument are the pro-lifers… The pro-choicers want nothing to do with it -just as one would do who was trying to bury a guilty feeling. I think the pro-choicers may feel guilt.

Not insinuating at all that you are pro-choice… ;). (but I can’t help being curious)
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In general I think that abortion is undesirable and should not be a criminal offence prior to a reasonable expectation of viability, and available after that time in extreme cases of threat to the mother. I support full and informed consent as a requirement in abortion, including knowledge of the range of positions on whether or not the zygote, embryo or fetus is a human being, and alternatives to abortion. I have posted in another thread about the common ground I see between pro- and anti-, choice and life factions:
  1. abortion is undesirable
  2. late abortion should be avoided
  3. abortion can have bad consequences for the woman
  4. the positive outcomes sought by abortion can sometimes be delivered in other ways, and to make this possible increases choice
  5. a child is not the sole responsibility of the mother, and society also has a responsibility to support children
  6. properly administered, adoption can often have good outcomes
My views on abortion are not particularly strong, and change their emphasis from time to time as I listen to more views. (I know this is hard for a Catholic to understand, because I used to be one. But it is true). My views on the abortion debate on the other hand are strong, and are as I have expressed them in this thread. Both sides need to use reasonable language. In my view the pro-life cause will continue to lose if it does not moderate its approach, and seek common ground. I have debated this in other threads. Just as I argue against extreme language by pro-lifers here, I do the same with pro-choicers elsewhere. If you want to debate an out-and-out pro-choicer, I am not your person!
 
Hokomai said:
My views on abortion are not particularly strong, and change their emphasis from time to time as I listen to more views. (I know this is hard for a Catholic to understand, because I used to be one. But it is true). My views on the abortion debate on the other hand are strong, and are as I have expressed them in this thread. Both sides need to use reasonable language.
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I think I understand your posts more clearly now… This is why you commented “So it is murder to kill a chicken for food?” -it was because you’re clarifying that language should be used in proper terms… This is what attracted you to this thread in the first place -the fact that posters come here attempting to insert new language in regards to the abortion “debate”.

I just don’t think that way… I believe in truths and not shades of grey -in other words, I believe there is an actual abortion dilemma which has an answer, and that the answer is non compromisable… I don’t believe that “debate” is the solution. Just like there are laws in mathematics and physics, there is also a law concerning what is or is not a human being. I believe science has answered this when we discovered that when the sperm and egg combine -there then exists a new being with a unique and complete DNA sequence of it’s own, capable of guiding the cells for the rest of the individuals life… What more needs to be said on a scientific level…? 🤷 Is it not crystal clear…?
 
Bartolome_Casas said:
“Holocaust” really is taken, for use regarding what the Nazis did to the Jews of Europe. They also use “Shoah.”

What term could we use to describe the 53 million and counting innocent unborn children killed legally so far by heartless or ignorant people in the USA?

It seems to me that part of problem in dealing with this monstrosity is that we have no term for it. We talk about the evil of abortion. But that doesn’t quite capture what has been happening, and what is still happening. Abortion is not just an issue. It is an EVENT of unprecedented proportions and evil.

The legal and deliberate killing of 53 million persons is SOMETHING VERY PARTICULAR, and as such, seems to need a name of its own (just as the Holocaust of 1942-1945 in Europe deserved and got a name of its own).

Creative people, what do you say? What are you ideas?

All my ideas are poor. Here a few of them:

–The Mass U.S. Child Killing of 1973-Present
–53 Million U.S. Children and Counting.
–The U.S. Dark Ages of Legal Child Murder, 1973-Present
–The Age of the Medical Murder of Unwanted Children
–American Molochism
–The Moloch Burning
–The American Feticide Dark Ages
–53 Million Legal Murders in the USA While the People of God Played Bingo
–The American Dark Ages, 1973-Present
–The Great Heartlessness

Okay, there are all horrible. We really need a nice one word term.

What are your ideas?
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Genocide would do: Genocide from the Greek root γένος génos (birth, race, stock, kind); secondly from Latin -cidium (cutting, killing) via French -cide.

God Bless,

Christopher.
 
TEPO said:
I think I understand your posts more clearly now… This is why you commented “So it is murder to kill a chicken for food?” -it was because you’re clarifying that language should be used in proper terms… This is what attracted you to this thread in the first place -the fact that posters come here attempting to insert new language in regards to the abortion “debate”.

I just don’t think that way… I believe in truths and not shades of grey -in other words, I believe there is an actual abortion dilemma which has an answer, and that the answer is non compromisable… I don’t believe that “debate” is the solution. Just like there are laws in mathematics and physics, there is also a law concerning what is or is not a human being. I believe science has answered this when we discovered that when the sperm and egg combine -there then exists a new being with a unique and complete DNA sequence of it’s own, capable of guiding the cells for the rest of the individuals life… What more needs to be said on a scientific level…? 🤷 Is it not crystal clear…?
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Thanks for accepting what I say about my point of view and for describing further your own, I think your argument is strong, but I do not agree it is ‘crystal clear’. If it was, you would not have so many people disagreeing with you. It is possible to think (as I do) that a human being in the sense you describes exisits, but that the law about killing this being should not be the same as the law about killing more developed human beings. Stephen Pinker (please anti-Pinkerites don’t divert the debate!) address this issue in his recent book demonstrating a general decline in violence. I posted a thread about it when I first read the book. In my view this well expresses the task facing those who want to adopt a pro-life position:
Opponents of abortion may see the decline of every form of violence but the killing of fetuses as a stunning case of moral hypocrisy. But there is another explanation for the discrepancy. Modern sensibilities have increasingly conceived moral worth in terms of *consciousness, *particularly the ability to suffer and flourish, and have identified consciousness with the activity of the brain. The change is part of the turning away from religion and custom and towards science and secular philosophy as a source of moral illumination. Just as the legally recognized end of life is now defined by the cessation of brain activity rather than the cessation of a heartbeat, the beginning of life is sensed to depend on the first stirrings of consciousness in the fetus. The current understanding of the neural basis of consciousness ties it to reverberating neural activity between the thalamus and cerebral cortex, which begins at around twenty-six weeks of gestational age. More to the point, people *conceive *of fetuses as less than fully conscious: the psychologists Heather Gray, Kurt Gray, and Daniel Wegner have shown that people think of fetuses as more capable of experience than robots or corpses, but less capable than animals, babies, children and adults. The vast majority of abortions are carried out well before the milestone of having a functioning brain, and thus are safely conceptualized, according to this understanding of the worth of human life, as fundamentally different from infanticide and other forms of violence.
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Abortion is the termination of a pregnancy. It’s purpose is to end a pregnancy.
 
The repugnant and damned rise of the Culture of Death.

But as several posters have said, not even words can describe this abomination.
 
LilyM said:
Slaughter of the Innocents(
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That is a very apt expression for what has been happening in the USA since “Roe vs. Wade” in 1973. It captures both the scale and the seriousness of the matter.
 
CGDouglas said:
Genocide would do: Genocide from the Greek root γένος génos (birth, race, stock, kind); secondly from Latin -cidium (cutting, killing) via French -cide.
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It just seems like “genocide” has been reserved for what happened to the Jews, to the Amemians, the Bosnians, and so on.

What is happening to unborn children seems to need its own term.
 
Hokomai said:
Thanks for accepting what I say about my point of view and for describing further your own, I think your argument is strong, but I do not agree it is ‘crystal clear’. If it was, you would not have so many people disagreeing with you. It is possible to think (as I do) that a human being in the sense you describes exisits, but that the law about killing this being should not be the same as the law about killing more developed human beings. Stephen Pinker (please anti-Pinkerites don’t divert the debate!) address this issue in his recent book demonstrating a general decline in violence. I posted a thread about it when I first read the book. In my view this well expresses the task facing those who want to adopt a pro-life position:

Opponents of abortion may see the decline of every form of violence but the killing of fetuses as a stunning case of moral hypocrisy. But there is another explanation for the discrepancy. Modern sensibilities have increasingly conceived moral worth in terms of consciousness, particularly the ability to suffer and flourish, and have identified consciousness with the activity of the brain. The change is part of the turning away from religion and custom and towards science and secular philosophy as a source of moral illumination. Just as the legally recognized end of life is now defined by the cessation of brain activity rather than the cessation of a heartbeat, the beginning of life is sensed to depend on the first stirrings of consciousness in the fetus. The current understanding of the neural basis of consciousness ties it to reverberating neural activity between the thalamus and cerebral cortex, which begins at around twenty-six weeks of gestational age. More to the point, people conceive of fetuses as less than fully conscious: the psychologists Heather Gray, Kurt Gray, and Daniel Wegner have shown that people think of fetuses as more capable of experience than robots or corpses, but less capable than animals, babies, children and adults. The vast majority of abortions are carried out well before the milestone of having a functioning brain, and thus are safely conceptualized, according to this understanding of the worth of human life, as fundamentally different from infanticide and other forms of violence.
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I don’t agree with Pinkers use of the term “consciousness”… He seems to be more concerned with the idea that -if the individual can’t feel pain due to an underdeveloped thalamus, then the individual isnt worth protecting… But that’s an opinion, and an incomplete understanding of what it means to be conscious.

Really, he should have avoided the term conscious, because science hasn’t declared what it exactly entails. What if the individual doesn’t feel the pain, but still feels life being taken away…? Also why does one feel obligated to strip away another individuals entire future…? What gives us the right to do that?
 
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