Abortion Discussion

Morag

SW wrote: »

The child died shortly after birth. It just re-affirms the suggestion that it is pretty much certain that a child born with that condition won't last long outside the womb.

which means the woman's body is being used as life support against her will.

Nodin

Festus wrote: »

is that rhetorical?

Mine wasn't......

Turtwig

Zubeneschamali wrote: »

This is the Atheism and Agnosticism forum, and we are on the lookout for that rare bird, the "pro-life" atheist.

There's been quite a few them over the course of these two threads. Some regulars of this forum are 'pro-life'.

Loafing Oaf

Turtwig wrote: »

There's been quite a few them over the course of these two threads. Some regulars of this forum are 'pro-life'.

Lots of keyboard pro-life warriors claim to be non-religious, yet somehow almost invariably turn out to agree with every other aspect of Catholic social teaching, on equally 'secular' grounds of course...

I'm not aware of any prominent Irish pro-life activist who could not be fairly described as a 'conservative Catholic'.

Zubeneschamali

Turtwig wrote: »

There's been quite a few them over the course of these two threads. Some regulars of this forum are 'pro-life'.

I remember some "pro-life" but of course we should legalise abortion atheists, like for rape or incest. Mainly seemed to be anti abortion in the same way they are anti women talking about their periods.

I don't recall any actual "IVF is Murder" atheists.

Brian Shanahan

eviltwin wrote: »

So you believe that the right decision for you should be enforced on everyone else? I'm very sorry for your loss, I am glad you both were able to say goodbye to your daughter the way you wanted but I'll be honest, I'm shocked you have so little empathy for others in the same situation. You don't have to agree with them but to force them to carry to term is unbelievably cruel.

Given his previous statements, I find his story about his baby which didn't survive somewhat unbelievable. He doesn't show the necessary empathy for others in the same position for me to be able to attribute truthfulness to the story.

Remember, lying about one's family past is a common tactic amongst anti-abortionist supporters.

Shrap

Zubeneschamali wrote: »

I remember some "pro-life" but of course we should legalise abortion atheists, like for rape or incest. Mainly seemed to be anti abortion in the same way they are anti women talking about their periods.

I don't recall any actual "IVF is Murder" atheists.

I don't recall* any "IVF is Murder" conservative Catholics, either.

There are many atheists (seemingly) who are uncomfortable with the word "choice" and would rather it applied only to hard-luck cases where we can all make a judgement as to whether the sad story is worthy enough of such an apparently HUGE decision as to kill a tiny life (human, not chicken).

To my mind though, the folks who really and genuinely have no difficulty with the notion of dispatching a non-sentient creature with no central nervous system (human or otherwise) do not see human life as "sacred".


Discuss?



*I'm a re-reg of Obliq. Didn't last long away from A&A ;-)

Zubeneschamali

Shrap wrote: »

I don't recall* any "IVF is Murder" conservative Catholics, either.

What do you reckon Festus is, so?

From that point on any deliberate act to destroy that life is homocide.

I can't think of any religion that lines up except either I-really-believe-all-the-really-insane-nonsense-most-catholics-smile-and-nod-about catholicism or some sort of fundamentalist Protestantism.

volchitsa

Brian Shanahan wrote: »

Given his previous statements, I find his story about his baby which didn't survive somewhat unbelievable. He doesn't show the necessary empathy for others in the same position for me to be able to attribute truthfulness to the story.

Remember, lying about one's family past is a common tactic amongst anti-abortionist supporters.

He certainly disappeared off pretty sharpish when I said I was prepared to discuss it with him. He posted to a couple of others (not to me) and then cleared off.

I'm still waiting for him to justify precisely what he said about other couples with respect to our own decision to terminate.

Zubeneschamali

volchitsa wrote: »

He certainly disappeared off pretty sharpish when I said I was prepared to discuss it with him.

In fairness, folks, maybe he really does have a tragic family story.

There isn't any universal karma that says people who've suffered a tragedy must be enlightened by it. Some people just remain, well, like Festus.

volchitsa

Zubeneschamali wrote: »

In fairness, folks, maybe he really does have a tragic family story.

There isn't any universal karma that says people who've suffered a tragedy must be enlightened by it. Some people just remain, well, like Festus.

No, absolutely. Suffering does not make a person into a saint, unfortunately. Sometimes it even makes them into worse people than they would otherwise be, ime.

I've no idea whether what he said was true or not, I'm just saying that he claimed to want to discuss the question with other families who had made a different decision, but when said I would, he ignored me - although he went on posting, even replying to a post made after mine. So he was being dishonest about that part of his post at the very least.

It makes me just a bit dubious about how genuine the rest of his post was, if its only value to him was as a sort of trump card to shut down discussion.

Shrap

Zubeneschamali wrote: »

What do you reckon Festus is, so?

From that point on any deliberate act to destroy that life is homocide.

I'd say, like many atheists on here, he has vestiges of his original religion that make an appearance from time to time. I don't think he liked me calling him out on the word "sacred", for example.

Obviously, he's not here to defend himself but I reckon that (like half the country, really) he can't/won't even approach examining some of the left over "life is sacred" stuff and perhaps has since gone even more hardline (through being asked to examine these beliefs?). Don't know. Maybe he married a placard waver from t'other side.

robindch

Loafing Oaf wrote: »

I'm not aware of any prominent Irish pro-life activist who could not be fairly described as a 'conservative Catholic'.

I suspect the issue could be one of association - I don't know any atheist or agnostic who'd like to be associated in any way with any of the leading "pro-lifers" for reasons which I think are fairly obvious.

Loafing Oaf

robindch wrote: »

I suspect the issue could be one of association - I don't know any atheist or agnostic who'd like to be associated in any way with any of the leading "pro-lifers" for reasons which I think are fairly obvious.

You reckon sizeable numbers of nonbelievers are privately 'pro-life' but are afraid to declare themselves in public because they would be embarrassed at being associated with Catholic wingnuts? But surely a few of them would have declared themselves publicly if that was the case? I mean gay men have come out against gay marriage and haven't been 'excommunicated' from the community, that's how liberalism rolls.

Surely the reality is that 'pro-life' is an inherently irrational and unscientific position that can only come, if not from old-school Catholicism, somewhere equally anti-enlightenment.

PopePalpatine

I remember one poster from an AH thread who was opposed to abortion from a "men's rights" POV.

robindch

Loafing Oaf wrote: »

You reckon sizeable numbers of nonbelievers are privately 'pro-life'

Nope - I don't think there are "sizeable numbers", but there certainly are some and I suspect they're keeping their heads down because it's an unpopular view for atheists + agnostics to hold and not only on account of the association problem with wingnuts I mentioned above.

Loafing Oaf wrote: »

Surely the reality is that 'pro-life' is an inherently irrational and unscientific position that can only come, if not from old-school Catholicism, somewhere equally anti-enlightenment.

Nope again. The abortion argument boils down to a decision concerning when one believes human rights, including the right to life, first inhere to a foetus.

Catholics are supposed to believe that human rights inhere from the moment of conception (whether they actually do or not is debatable). And it goes up from there - some people choose the subsequent moment of implantation, the moment when the first brainwaves appear, the moment the foetus can survive outside the womb, the moment of birth and so on. The "pro-choice" position arises by default, if the foetus is not believed to have acquired human rights.

One of the few things that people in the "pro-life" and "pro-choice" camps both agree, is that, at some point during pregnancy or very shortly afterwards, the foetus goes from having no human rights to having full human rights. The disagreement arises on where that point should be and that's less a scientific debate, and more of an ethical one, albeit one perhaps informed by science.

I do think that if both camps recognised this similarity in their debating positions, and where most of the disagreements arise from, the debate would be a little more positive.

Shrap

robindch wrote: »

The "pro-choice" position arises by default, if the foetus is not believed to have acquired human rights.

But this is where "pro-choice" position often ties itself up in knots. Some even argue that the foetus is not properly alive and is a bunch of cells (in order to get out of it being called human). Some (who do agree it's human, and alive) find that this position means that they can only argue for abortion where there is some fatal flaw or really hard luck reason for an abortion. If (as I do) you believe that the foetus is absolutely human, and alive, you must decide at what point are the "human rights" worth protecting in law.

One of the few things that people in the "pro-life" and "pro-choice" camps both agree, is that, at some point during pregnancy or very shortly afterwards, the foetus goes from having no human rights to having full human rights. The disagreement arises on where that point should be and that's less a scientific debate, and more of an ethical one, albeit one perhaps informed by science.

I do think that if both camps recognised this similarity in their debating positions, and where most of the disagreements arise from, the debate would be a little more positive.

It is an ethical position, as is the concept of "human rights" in the first place. This concept means sweet fanny adams in countries where people are killed off regularly for whatever reason. It's a moveable concept that is much broader in meaning in countries where grown adults have less chance of surviving than in our own. In our countries, where the "right to life" as an adult is assured, the concept becomes narrowed to a fight over the point where a foetus can be considered expendable (as expendable as a born life in a country where people starve to death, for example).

I can understand how the abortion argument boils down to the measure of control we should be allowed to have over the death of a human being, and folk who are anti-abortion say "none" without any relative values placed on those that are born (or just about to be born) against those that are not born and non-sentient. The value of life IS relative though.

I think we need more discussions about relative values of life. It's no use to say "it's always too valuable to do away with" as it's clear that different societies set their own different standards for this.

Loafing Oaf

robindch wrote: »

Nope - I don't think there are "sizeable numbers", but there certainly are some and I suspect they're keeping their heads down because it's an unpopular view for atheists + agnostics to hold and not only on account of the association problem with wingnuts I mentioned above.Nope again. The abortion argument boils down to a decision concerning when one believes human rights, including the right to life, first inhere to a foetus.

Catholics are supposed to believe that human rights inhere from the moment of conception (whether they actually do or not is debatable). And it goes up from there - some people choose the subsequent moment of implantation, the moment when the first brainwaves appear, the moment the foetus can survive outside the womb, the moment of birth and so on. The "pro-choice" position arises by default, if the foetus is not believed to have acquired human rights.

One of the few things that people in the "pro-life" and "pro-choice" camps both agree, is that, at some point during pregnancy or very shortly afterwards, the foetus goes from having no human rights to having full human rights. The disagreement arises on where that point should be and that's less a scientific debate, and more of an ethical one, albeit one perhaps informed by science.

I do think that if both camps recognised this similarity in their debating positions, and where most of the disagreements arise from, the debate would be a little more positive.

And do you believe someone can be 'pro-life' from a genuinely secular human rights perspective and still support the right travel? I mean you can understand how someone whose mind was formed by Catholic hypocrisy and 'mental reservation' can reconcile those two positions, but I can't see how someone with a supposedly rational belief in the 'right to life of the unborn' can support the right of Irish women to take that right away from their 'unborn babies'...

robindch

Loafing Oaf wrote: »

And do you believe someone can be 'pro-life' from a genuinely secular human rights perspective and still support the right travel?

I mean exactly what I said above - people disagree about when human rights inhere and this is the essential difference from which all other differences derive.

I don't quite know what you mean when you mention a "genuinely secular human rights perspective" or what relevance this has to the "right to freedom to travel" introduced in one or other of the referendums, or what exact meaning you wish to apply to the term "support" in any of this.

If people believe that human rights inhere from the moment of conception, and that nothing is more valuable than life, then I'd expect people to be out stopping people from travelling abroad for abortion. But I'd also expect them to be stopping soldiers from travelling, stopping cars from moving, campaigning against obesity, heart disease and smoking with the same energy as they do against abortion. And much else besides. Since we see almost none of these things, I conclude - I think fairly safely - that people don't really believe what they say they believe.

volchitsa

robindch wrote: »

I suspect the issue could be one of association - I don't know any atheist or agnostic who'd like to be associated in any way with any of the leading "pro-lifers" for reasons which I think are fairly obvious.

I don't understand why you should think that - it's perfectly natural for sometimes quite inimical groups to have certain views in common, and if these are strongly held they can overcome their differences - I mean Sinn Fein actually supported the DUP in 2007 to defeat a motion calling for UK abortion law to apply in Northern Ireland, so if they can do it, so surely can agnostics!

But no, not a single agnostic is willing to stand up in public and be counted, yet there are lots of anonymous posters all claiming to be pro life agnostics. And very very few willing to describe themselves as pro life for religious reasons.

There's a problem there somewhere.

Loafing Oaf

volchitsa wrote: »

I don't understand why you should think that - it's perfectly natural for sometimes quite inimical groups to have certain views in common, and if these are strongly held they can overcome their differences - I mean Sinn Fein actually supported the DUP in 2007 to defeat a motion calling for UK abortion law to apply in Northern Ireland, so if they can do it, so surely can agnostics!

But no, not a single agnostic is willing to stand up in public and be counted.

Plus if such a person were to stand up, is it not certain the Catholic Right would be falling over themselves to stress "Look this guy is not one of us, he has no issue with divorce homosexuality etc., yet he believes in 'the right to life of the unborn'"., so if anything their agnosticism would be publicly reinforced. So perhaps its simpler to conclude the 'genuinely secular pro-lifer' is a vanishingly rare breed, if not entirely mythical...

volchitsa

Loafing Oaf wrote: »

Plus if such a person were to stand up, is it not certain the Catholic Right would be falling over themselves to stress "Look this guy is not one of us, he has no issue with divorce homosexuality etc., yet he believes in 'the right to life of the unborn'"., so if anything their agnosticism would be publicly reinforced. So perhaps its simpler to conclude the 'genuinely secular pro-lifer' is a vanishingly rare breed, if not entirely mythical...

When a particular kind of person is only to be found as anonymous posters on Internet, and never as RL figures one can identify, two explanations come to mind.

The first is that such a person would be so despised by their entourage that they must hide their true beliefs so as to pass for "normal" - in western society that usually means paedophiles, racists etc, though of course in the past, and in certain places even today, it was enough to be homosexual or an atheist. I don't think the mere fact of being a pro-life atheist would really cause such opprobrium that it would be unthinkable to "come out". Surprise yes, active prejudice no.

The other possibility is that there are no such people, and someone who doesn't fit that profile has simply created a persona. I think the usual term is a sock puppet, especially if the poster concerned already has another identity on Internet, and is using this one to support his views.

robindch

volchitsa wrote: »

I don't understand why you should think that

I think that because I know a few people personally who think this way

volchitsa

robindch wrote: »

I think that because I know a few people personally who think this way

Sorry - think what way?
Are strongly pro life but are afraid to say so?
Are atheist, but are afraid to say so?
Would be fine with admitting to being either, but seem to think that both together are a problem?
Or what?

Shrap

There are quite a few people up here on A&A who I would class as more "pro-life" than me, in that they nearly have to class a foetus as "not really alive" or "a clump of cells" so as to be able to justify abortion.

I reckon that kind of thinking does more rightly belong with the emotional attachment to being human from some arbitrary point, and is similar to "life is sacred". Essentially, a foetus IS human, and alive and (usually) with potential for birth, childhood, adulthood.

Absolam

I don't think the 'life is sacred' pov is analogous to an emotional attachment to being human from some point.

The idea that live is sacred derives from an acceptance of the authority of a god to which that life belongs and over which the god has asserted dominion. If the god decides a particular life is, or all lives are, no longer sacred, then it's gods will and the objection just dissappears.

An emotional attachment to human life derives from the chemical soup that is our biological drive to continue the race; it's got no more to do with belief in gods than the way we feel when babies smile at us. Why we each feel more or less attachment to human lives in the same circumstances is probably a whole other (technical) discussion.

The only reason the two belong together is both, to varying degrees, encourage an opposition to the destruction of human life, but they both appear to stem from entirely different foundations? Unless you consider that believing in a god is also a result of our biological drive to continue the race, which is certainly an idea worth considering, but maybe not an overly popular one on A&A

Peregrinus

Shrap wrote: »

There are quite a few people up here on A&A who I would class as more "pro-life" than me, in that they nearly have to class a foetus as "not really alive" or "a clump of cells" so as to be able to justify abortion.

Absolam wrote: »

I don't think the 'life is sacred' pov is analogous to an emotional attachment to being human from some point.

The idea that live is sacred derives from an acceptance of the authority of a god to which that life belongs and over which the god has asserted dominion. If the god decides a particular life is, or all lives are, no longer sacred, then it's gods will and the objection just dissappears . . .

Funny you should say these things, guys.

Although we commonly use “sacred” in a religious context, its meaning is not intrinsically religious. Ultimately it comes from the Latin sacer, which means “set apart” - and not necessarily in a good way. The primary meaning in classical Latin was in fact the negative one; sacer meant “accursed, horrible, detestable”. Home sacer was an outlaw - he could be killed by anyone with impunity. But simultaneously the word had the secondary meaning, in the right context, of “set apart for the gods”. That could be dedicated to the gods as a human sacrifice - human sacrifice was not practised in classical Rome but sacer was the term Roman writers used for sacrificial victims in other societies they encountered - or dedicated to the gods as, e.g, a priest or priestess. Sacer was also used for places, goods or property dedicated to religious purposes.

Sacramentum, an oath, was a ritual whereby you called down condemnation on yourself (both civic and religious condemnation; the Romans would not have made any distinction) if you failed to live up to your undertaking.

Contrary to popular belief, Christianity was rather less preoccupied with judging, condemning and outlawing people or things than the preceding pagan religions, so as the Empire christianized sacer came to be used more and more in positive senses, and in the religious context. By the time the word transitioned into the romance languages and from there into English the positive meaning was the primary or sole sense. And it was used mostly in a religious context - but not always; a tombstone that says “Sacred to the memory of Samuel Butler” or similar is not making any religious claim. Samuel Butler is not a god.

So I think you’re onto something, Shrap, when you suggest that those who take the line that “a foetus is not human” or “. . . not alive” are basically doing the same thing as those who take the “life is sacred” line. They are basically setting apart the foetus by denying (in the teeth, it has to be said, of scientific fact) that it is human or that it is alive so that they don’t have to accord it the respect that they normally feel compelled to accord to living humans. And those who say that “human life is sacred” may have religious reasons for their stance, but the stance is not an intrinsically religious one. It’s a claim, essentially, that human life is set apart from other natural phenomena in having a transcendent claim to our respect - a claim that many humanists (as the name suggests) would basically endorse.

I class myself as pro-choice, but with a certain queasiness about that. But I find the “not alive”/”not human” rationalisations for a pro-choice position are deeply unconvincing.

alaimacerc

Shrap wrote: »

There are quite a few people up here on A&A who I would class as more "pro-life" than me, in that they nearly have to class a foetus as "not really alive" or "a clump of cells" so as to be able to justify abortion.

This being the sense of the word "nearly" as in "don't do this at all", right?

The term "clump of cells" is pretty consistent with early embryonic development, which certainly has some pertinence when one is debating with those claiming as axiomatic that "human individuation" or "personhood" starts at conception. (Everyone in the RW anti-abortion and no-one (curiously!) in the internet one would throw in "ensoulment" as synonymous with these concepts.) But it's not a claim that it's not animate life, nor that it's not of the same species as we typists. (Or in cases where it is, proves afresh the old maxim that there's no cause so right that it's not followed by some right idiots.) It's pretty hyperbolic (and becoming progressively moreso) if one continues to apply it as differentiation and development proceeds.

Determining at what point "unborn child" or "clump of cells" is the greater hyperbole would be an interesting exercise, though ultimately not an especially crucial one.

alaimacerc

Shrap wrote: »

There are many atheists (seemingly) who are uncomfortable with the word "choice" and would rather it applied only to hard-luck cases where we can all make a judgement as to whether the sad story is worthy enough of such an apparently HUGE decision as to kill a tiny life (human, not chicken).

I must admit (speaking as someone qualifying as an "extreme liberal" on this issue (AKA "extremely boring dead-median centrist" in overall Western democracy terms) I'm not wild about "choice" as a term. It's poorly defined (and being the type of pedant that aspires to clear definitions, this reflexively irritates me), and has many of the same whimsical, consumerised connotations that "on demand" does (albeit to a different degree, and with a different gloss). Especially as the go-to example is invariable ("mainland") UK, which isn't formally "choice"-based, anyway. (Just not as heavy on the second-guessing aspects as some people would clearly like.)

To my mind though, the folks who really and genuinely have no difficulty with the notion of dispatching a non-sentient creature with no central nervous system (human or otherwise) do not see human life as "sacred".

No difficulty at all? From a psychological PoV that's an interesting question. As a practical matter, it's squeamish qualms vs criminal sanctions (or at the very least, healthcare equity), though...

I think it was Mary Warnock in some TV interview that offered a definition of "sacred" on the lines of "only to be approached with reverence and respect". (I suspect in some broadly similar sort of reproductive ethics context.) I don't think reverence and respect are necessarily determinative of what the law should be, as such. And certainly the "Terminations for Medical Reasons" people seem to regard the net effect of present law as antipathetical to that in their own cases...

volchitsa

Festus wrote: »

Ok. We had a complication and my daughter was delivered by caesarian at around the mid 20 weeks mark. She was baptized, lived for a few days and died in my arms.

She was beautiful but due to the complication had not developed enough.

Abortion was never a consideration for me or her mother.

I'm still waiting for Festus to reply to me about when he said he wanted to talk to others who had made the decision to terminate a pregnancy.
He doesn't seem all that interested somehow.

Looking back at his post here, it seems to me the complication he refers to was in fact a decision to end the pregnancy so early that the baby then died. I realize how tragic that is, but I don't see how it is all that different to someone having an abortion because of a risk to the mother just a few weeks earlier, except that the chance the baby might live is a little better.

But surely that is mostly a question of luck, as to when the risk arises?

So his judgement about couples who have terminations is all the more unwarranted - how was their own decision to terminate at 20 something weeks fundamentally different?

And what if his wife had not felt as he did, and had wished to protect her health by terminating earlier - does he think her wishes should have been ignored? He seems to, since he thinks other couples should not have had the choice he says he had.