Um... Holy F***...

Apple just found his "Utopia"; because as long as they don't register the birth, then the baby fairy hasn't changed the baby into a human yet.

(Excerpt) They also argued that parents should be able to have the baby killed if it turned out to be disabled without their knowing before birth, for example citing that “only the 64 per cent of Down’s syndrome cases” in Europe are diagnosed by prenatal testing." (End)

And then there's (Excerpt) Infantile Tay–Sachs disease. Infants with Tay–Sachs disease appear to develop normally for the first six months after birth. Then, as nerve cells become distended with gangliosides, a relentless deterioration of mental and physical abilities occurs and progresses inexorably. The child becomes blind, deaf, unable to swallow, and develops atrophy and paralysis. Death usually occurs before the age of four. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tay–Sachs_disease

Tay-Sachs must be the "El Dorado" of illnesses for the anti-abortionists. Four years of continuous deterioration leading to death. Blindness, deafness, choking, unable to move properly, weakness....a real smorgasbord of suffering. The anti-abortionists must be exhilarated as they wait for the developing fetus to be brought to term knowing they will have four years of watching the agony of a baby and then a toddler and then a young child endure agony that people with the hardest of hearts wouldn't impose on the lowest of creatures, all in the name of reverence for human life. Or so they say.

I wonder how many anti-abortionists on the board have visited a hospital specializing in sick children, specifically genetically related diseases. Instead of forcing women to have an ultrasound or a conversation with a doctor before procuring an abortion perhaps genetic testing should be compulsory or, at the least, a visit to such a hospital before one continues a pregnancy. Of course, that would greatly reduce suffering and that can't be good for the soul, can it? :rolleyes:
 
(Excerpt) They also argued that parents should be able to have the baby killed if it turned out to be disabled without their knowing before birth, for example citing that “only the 64 per cent of Down’s syndrome cases” in Europe are diagnosed by prenatal testing." (End)

And then there's (Excerpt) Infantile Tay–Sachs disease. Infants with Tay–Sachs disease appear to develop normally for the first six months after birth. Then, as nerve cells become distended with gangliosides, a relentless deterioration of mental and physical abilities occurs and progresses inexorably. The child becomes blind, deaf, unable to swallow, and develops atrophy and paralysis. Death usually occurs before the age of four. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tay–Sachs_disease

Tay-Sachs must be the "El Dorado" of illnesses for the anti-abortionists. Four years of continuous deterioration leading to death. Blindness, deafness, choking, unable to move properly, weakness....a real smorgasbord of suffering. The anti-abortionists must be exhilarated as they wait for the developing fetus to be brought to term knowing they will have four years of watching the agony of a baby and then a toddler and then a young child endure agony that people with the hardest of hearts wouldn't impose on the lowest of creatures, all in the name of reverence for human life. Or so they say.

I wonder how many anti-abortionists on the board have visited a hospital specializing in sick children, specifically genetically related diseases. Instead of forcing women to have an ultrasound or a conversation with a doctor before procuring an abortion perhaps genetic testing should be compulsory or, at the least, a visit to such a hospital before one continues a pregnancy. Of course, that would greatly reduce suffering and that can't be good for the soul, can it? :rolleyes:

Maybe they could get stencils, like fighter pilots have, and put a outline of a baby (with a line through it) on the side of their cars.
 
another argument for post birth abortions

considering current overpopulation of the world, this may become more serious

http://news.yahoo.com/yes-serious-ethicists-defend-birth-abortion-argument-raucous-113213891.html

Nope:

"Minerva and Guibilini understand that others may hold a different definition of personhood and when this begins, but emphasize that for their argument, this is the definition that stands. The two also state that they are not advocating in this paper that the practice become law, but as ethicists it is their job to "put forward moral arguments." Minerva stated on the radio show that "We didn't write a proposal to suggest this should be legal."


Total wanking. Which is what academic ethicists do. I'm surprised to find that so few here seem to be familiar. I thought most here hold at least undergraduate degrees.

Not only will this never be legal, no one will ever attempt to make it legal.

It doesn't matter. It's a exercise in jerking off on their part, and IMO on the part of the men who are "concerned."
 
Nope:

"Minerva and Guibilini understand that others may hold a different definition of personhood and when this begins, but emphasize that for their argument, this is the definition that stands. The two also state that they are not advocating in this paper that the practice become law, but as ethicists it is their job to "put forward moral arguments." Minerva stated on the radio show that "We didn't write a proposal to suggest this should be legal."


Total wanking. Which is what academic ethicists do. I'm surprised to find that so few here seem to be familiar. I thought most here hold at least undergraduate degrees.

Not only will this never be legal, no one will ever attempt to make it legal.

It doesn't matter. It's a exercise in jerking off on their part, and IMO on the part of the men who are "concerned."

i am not so sure of that, life is becoming cheaper as it becomes more plentiful

the way things are going, malthus may have the last say in this

we are lucky to live in a nation that exports food rather than having to import it

also, our population is not growing as fast as other nations
 
Good golly, miss molly - that is pretty crazy stuff...

Not by Roman standards. I support a return to traditional western, Greco-Roman values, in which parents have the right to expose unwanted children. Naturally enough, should someone find the child before it dies, they should have the right to enslave it. Because they had every right to just watch it die, the child owes them their life, and it would be unjust to prevent them from collecting on that debt.
 
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/health/h...s-no-different-from-abortion-experts-say.html



Wow... now where have we heard arguments like that before?



And here we go... trying to get the phrasing to 'sound better' so that they don't come off as sociopathic lunatics. Very familiar to what happened when pro-abortion was rephrased 'pro-choice'



This guy is fucking delusional. He has the nerve to proclaim that it is opponents that are the ones that cause it to lead to lynching and genocide? he talks about it being ok to murder an infant... wow... fucking wow...

All fairly logical if you start from the premise that the reason killing is bad is because humans are rational beings, reduce to absurdity, and bite the bullet rather than backtracking from your position. Of course, that's really not the reason that humans consider killing other humans bad. It's an instinct - it does not and cannot have a rational basis. When you see someone being killed, your brain does not logically think "well, this is a rational being, rational beings shouldn't be killed, therefore, this is wrong". No, the instincts are driven by the desire of your genes to propagate themselves. Rationally, why would it be wrong to kill a rational being anyway? Morality isn't a rational thing, and if you utterly reject the validity of instinct and delve far enough into these depths, you inevitably arrive at nihilism.

Of course, this is driven, ironically enough, by a desire to do away with "speciesest" logic, IE those with an animal rights bent. If you think that humans aren't inherently more worthy of life than animals merely based on their species, but don't want to come to the extreme conclusion that it's wrong to kill animals, you have to find a reason that we protect humans whereas we don't protect animals. So, naturally enough, you arrive at our ability to reason. However, this lands you in the moral conundrum of what to do with humans who really don't have the capability of reason - such as the mentally retarded and infants.

Naturally, your instinct wants to protect these individuals (we pretty much protect everyone besides those that just don't have any brain function at all), but it's not justified in light of this logical rule you've come up with - there are many humans who really don't have any more reasoning capability than the smartest animals. Most go through mental contortions to differentiate the two, or abandon the rule. Others bit the bullet, and, naturally enough, receive a great deal of death threats.

It doesn't really model the way human think about killing at all - the instinct is adaptable, and where it can be bent so that a person finds it acceptable to kill some rational people, it can also be bent to humanize creatures like pets that we form a bond to, even though they're clearly not rational at all. Also, it's mighty convenient that this supposed threshold of rationality, after which it's no longer ethical to kill a creature, just happens to be somewhere around where the average humans reasoning ability lies. What if an alien existed that had so much reasoning capability that they were to us what we are to animals? Would that change anything?

In the case of abortion, the fact that the fetus is hidden away, and, as such, an instinct to protect it never really evolved, probably has more to do with the fact that it's been considered acceptable in so many societies than the fact that fetuses do not pass some threshold of rationality. Of course, the primary tool of abortion opponents is to show drawings or carefully selected pictures of fetuses and embryo's that look similar to babies, in order to trigger the instinct, and one of the primary tools abortion proponents have used is to do the opposite. Nothing really to do with this rule at all.
 
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I, of course, prefer to base my argument on the fact that we do generally find it acceptable to let members of our species who have no higher brain function (essentially, nothing but a brain stem) at all die, such as anancephaletic babies and the brain dead. This gives you a smaller period of time in which abortion is acceptable than waiting until they have more reasoning capability than any animal, around the second trimester. Thusly, I avoid both the potential moral pitfalls of the reasoning test, and, also, animal rights extremism. Also, it avoids the hysterical reaction of the pro-lifers, which forces unnecessary cruelty an individual that can understand cruelty for the sake of one that can't, for no other reason than the fact that they've overextended the reach of this instinct in a way that's inconsistent with the view of pretty much every human society in history.

It is still a speciesest test, I guess - it does not, after all, apply to animals who have more brain function than that provided by the brain stem. But I am not going to jump headfirst into monstrosity in a misguided search for total rational consistency, which I don't think is even truly possible anyway.
 
It is still a speciesest test, I guess - it does not, after all, apply to animals who have more brain function than that provided by the brain stem. But I am not going to jump headfirst into monstrosity in a misguided search for total rational consistency, which I don't think is even truly possible anyway.

And I bet you think some species are better than others too!

You, sir, are a specist!
 
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