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Post by Deleted on Sept 5, 2009 10:13:58 GMT
I think the idea of removal and incubation will cause as many problems as it solves, more even. Not least, what happens when the child decides it wants to find its biological parents. The same problems arise, wouldn't they, with a child born full term and given up for adoption? The parent(s) of an aborted foetus kept alive artificially would presumably have to be recorded on a birth certificate?
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Post by jean on Sept 5, 2009 15:51:51 GMT
Well yes, but I suppose that you have a termination rather than taking the baby to term, giving birth and having it adopted because you want as little involvement as possible.
Feeding greater involvement in bit by bit would not be an attractive prospect for a woman pregnant with a child she did not want.
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Post by trubble on Sept 5, 2009 18:28:07 GMT
I think the idea of removal and incubation will cause as many problems as it solves, more even. Not least, what happens when the child decides it wants to find its biological parents. Indeed. I think the list of problems is almost too long to thrash out because each of them (as you and skylark are discussing) is probably already an existing problem for ethics. Another hurdle to such an incubation plan is that women who might otherwise have terminated the pregnancy at just a few weeks along, when we are still talking about zygotes, or even before 3 months, will be forced socially to continue not just to a viable time but to somewhere near full term -- the pressure will be something along the lines of the 'breast is best' campaign eventually. (I foretell.) From the point of 'rights' I would consider that possibility to be a heinous attack on a woman's right.
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Post by Liberator on Sept 5, 2009 19:19:32 GMT
I was being a bit OTT but a lot of the assumptions thrown around are just that. What is a human life? If you get technical and do it by DNA then how many changes do you allow before you declassify it as human? Or do you take the simpler approach of saying that human beings have human babies (until some idiot starts messing around with genetics)? I think there is a case for not recognising some extremes of disability as worth the bother to keep alive and more likely a mercy for them - how do we really know that they are entirely unthinking? Once, we used to think that different emotions went on in different organs. Now we think it's all the brain. Personally, I think looking for the mind in the brain is lot like looking for the little people in the TV.
I'm niot sure, Trubs, whether your fear of prolonged pregnancy until a caesarean looks viable is any greater than pressure to come to term and have it adopted. The only real objection to that apart from 'awkwardness' seems to be bonding issues. I'm more concerned with future technology lowering the viability age and taking the upper limit down with it. If you say instead that if viable, will be kept alive, you then face the question of what 'viable' means.
You will never satisfy everybody because some people want abortion right up to birth and others on no account whatsoever. As far as I'm aware, the fuss over late-term abortion is a typical American dishonest word-play because it's a situation that falls outside of the usual reasons for abortion anyway.
There are problems with prematures anyway but we don't know to what extent the problems may cause premature birth or arise because it is assumed to be dead anyway. It would be very nice if somebody could develop a system for transplant. Then you get your early abortion and a lot less in vitro work, most of which is still pretty iffy. Except that the new mother gets somebody else's baby.
There's really no proper single answer is there? It comes down to a least bad compromise. At the other end of things, I think we do too much to prevent spontaneous abortion as it is, with the result of a lot of children being born with something wrong with them. No doubt disability lobbies would have something to say about that, but I feel we should direct Nature more than directly fight against it.
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Post by chefmate on Sept 6, 2009 2:07:17 GMT
sorry, you are killing a human being.
Most of you are young and have been brainwashed with fancy words but you are in favor of killing a human being......the parents are human so therefore any unborn babies are human.
I don't know what is so difficult about that but in order to justify a first degree murder the law and words have to be changed to make it acceptable to ignorant people grasping for an excuse to get rid of their indescrestions or irresponsibility.
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Post by trubble on Sept 6, 2009 4:16:11 GMT
I'm sorry, chefmate, I agree with you on so many things I have seen you write here, but although it is a human being, for what else could it be being both a being and human, it cannot be likened to first degree murder any more than the murder of a pig or a cow can be. Have you ever looked close up at a real foetus at any stage of development?
I differentiate between various stages of foetal development so I won't argue that there are late abortions that don't cross the line but I will defend the woman having a first term - and responsible in some cases - abortion from any naive slur such as first degree murder. Defend it very strongly and passionately indeed.
I respect your opinion, I just don't agree.
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Post by Deleted on Sept 6, 2009 7:24:02 GMT
sorry, you are killing a human being. Most of you are young and have been brainwashed with fancy words but you are in favor of killing a human being......the parents are human so therefore any unborn babies are human. I don't know what is so difficult about that but in order to justify a first degree murder the law and words have to be changed to make it acceptable to ignorant people grasping for an excuse to get rid of their indescrestions or irresponsibility. As I pointed out on another thread, if an embryo is an unborn baby, any woman who goes in for IVF will be responsible for multiple murder - unless she finds a clinic prepared to fertilise one single egg! Yet these people are seldom targetted by anti-abortionists. To the best of my knowledge, only Lin has spoken out against it.
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Post by jean on Sept 6, 2009 9:23:39 GMT
What is your definition of young, I wonder?
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Post by Deleted on Sept 6, 2009 9:39:16 GMT
What is your definition of young, I wonder? Yes, I was wondering that! I think I'm right in saying that both Jean and I qualify for our bus pass!
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Post by trubble on Sept 7, 2009 11:01:25 GMT
I'm nearly 40 and anyone who says that's not young will do so at their peril.
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Post by Alpha Hooligan on Sept 7, 2009 14:16:58 GMT
So why not take the baby to full term, and have it adopted? Severly premature babies stand a much higher chance of being born disabled if they survive. Also, many late abortions are perfomed because doctors have discovered there is a problem. You can't force or coerce folk (well, women) to carry a child for 9 months. Also, the are more orphans out there than people wanting to adopt them...this is not a solution, it is a propagation of misery for the kids who nobody wants. AH
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Post by chefmate on Sept 8, 2009 1:58:17 GMT
one excuse is as good as another for killing.
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Post by Liberator on Sept 8, 2009 3:58:56 GMT
My boss's son's girlfriend has just given birth last week to a baby due December. When in December, I don't know, but to me, that puts it close to the top end of UK abortion (of course that's illegal here). If it is seriously 'impaired', I would say to let it die, but if 'normal' it seems to me that the way of keeping it alive should emulate a womb without breathing and with an artificial umbilicus more than the way it is approached now.
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Post by Alpha Hooligan on Sept 8, 2009 22:20:32 GMT
one excuse is as good as another for killing. Not sure if that is aimed at my post Cheffy, but I'll say this. No one has the right to tell another what to do or not to do with their own body...not one single person...alive, dead or divine. AH
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Post by Liberator on Sept 9, 2009 1:31:07 GMT
But a woman's body is host to another life - in the view of some - and she responsible for it for some time after that. I feel the real problem is not that at all, it is that as a society 'we' care only about economic factors that for 100 years have been directed to men without allowing family commitment and allowing women to join has been all one way - the corporatist way - back to before women gained concessionary freedom to admit they had children to care for (because those children were working too in wage-slavery) - and will not change their structure to allow that they exist to serve the right of men and women to build their own home together, not to demand they sacrifice that human intimacy to serve them. Women change to fit into a Man's World; that world refuses to change to accept women's expectation of far greater freedom and control, and to allow men equality with women.
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Post by Alpha Hooligan on Sept 9, 2009 7:50:12 GMT
All our bodies are hosts to other life (bacteria and such-like).
Those with religious convictions should be prepared to suffer with all kinds of horrible bacteria and germ induced illnesses if "all life is sacred"...or leave other folks alone when they decide what's best for their own bodies and their own well being.
Bottom line: It's nobody elses business what a woman decides to do with her body unless those people are directly responsible for the woman or involved in a relationship with her.
AH
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Post by Big Lin on Sept 9, 2009 23:58:06 GMT
one excuse is as good as another for killing. Not sure if that is aimed at my post Cheffy, but I'll say this. No one has the right to tell another what to do or not to do with their own body...not one single person...alive, dead or divine. AH It's not that simple, Alpha. We are talking about a foetus that will (if allowed to develop to term) become a living person, boy or girl. Simply saying that only the pregnant woman has any say in the matter is just a view that I can't agree with. What about the foetus? Doesn't he or she have the right to life? What about repeat abortions - where it's clearly being used as a substitute for responsible contraception? I believe that the right to life is the most sacred of all which is why I support the death penalty for murder and why I oppose abortion in most cases. Simply saying 'her body, her choice,' or words to that effect, seems to me to be encouraging a selfish, callous attitude of indifference to human life. If we look on a foetus as something to be flushed down the toilet as some kind of inconvenience; if we look on an abortion as more or less the same as blowing our nose; if we don't value the life of the unborn as highly as those who are living and breathing among us, then how can we truly claim to be compassionate, humane individuals? It may be an emotional argument but that's what my heart tells me.
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Post by Liberator on Sept 10, 2009 3:37:49 GMT
I'll agree that the woman 'has a say' but I want that to be her unconstrained say and right now, it far too often is a case that 'society' is only interested in how she can serve it, not how it can serve her. She gets a 'choice' alright, the same kind of choice that Margaret Thatcher said of the homeless and workless, that "They chose to live like that". Yes they did - but only because the only work and accomodation they could get was ever worse. Women choose abortion - all too often because the alternative is that since they could have got rid of it to serve, 'society' has no obligation to help them choose to raise a child. Try to say women (and men) might actually want children and you get shouted down that "Not everybody wants so be a traditional housewife". No more they don't - but that does not mean they want to be a 'traditional' wage-slave either! That's a well known false dichotomy argument: if you are not a virgin you are a slut, if you stand up to the boss for better conditions you are a Communist agitator, if you question the regime you are an Enemy of the State.
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Post by trubble on Sept 10, 2009 8:01:55 GMT
It is that simple, Lin.
In all your 'what abouts' you are highlighting the complexities and different issues that are involved - and they are complex all right - and as the opening gambit of this thread suggests, there are many more complexities to come with the advance of technology and medical care...
But..
The only way to ensure a fair system is to give the choice to the host of whether to host or not and give guidelines to an acceptable time frame within which to make a decision.
Any other system is unjust.
That's a hard question not least because a foetus is not developed, it is developing; 9 hours since conception, 9 days, 9 weeks, 9 months - these are all so different from each other!
Does a foetus have more rights than the woman carrying it and if so why?
I can't think why a bunch of cells developing should have the right to develop without the mother's consent.
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Post by riotgrrl on Sept 10, 2009 10:28:26 GMT
Does the foetus have a 'right to life'?
No.
And I always reject this argument, as it is an attempt to use quasi-legal language to make an emotive point.
Only full humans have a right to life. In Scotland - and the law may be different in other jurisdictions - a person is considered fully human and therefore inherits all the human rights after it takes one breathe independently.
Take as comparison animals. Some people argue for 'animal rights', but they really mean is animal welfare. The use of the language of 'rights' is inappropriate. Animals can never exercise their rights. They cannot go to court to enforce their rights.
(Of course, neither can a newborn baby or a person with severe mental impairment, but because of their humanity we appoint people in a position of agency to them to ensure that their rights are protected.)
So, in law, no, a feotus does NOT have a right to life.
Should it? That's a different question.
If you gave a feotus full human rights from the moment of conception a whole range of absurdities would occur. A pregnant woman who smoked, or drunk, or went ski-ing or horse-riding, could perhaps be prosecuted for endangering another human life. If human rights were granted from conception, the subsequent restrictions on the mother's rights and freedoms would be unacceptable. The pregnant woman's behaviour would be dictated by the state to such an extent that she would become a kind of slave.
The debate on abortion cannot proceed on the basis of 'rights'. It needs to be about the welfare of the foetus, and the duties of others to protect it, not the foetus's rights.
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