Right to Life Ethical Considerations

There is a difference when a person willfully has intercourse, and against her will. With awesome power, comes awesome responsibility.
The choice is in having intercourse or not.This is in no way trying to control a woman's sexuality. Since when is it a right to be able to have sex without the possibility of getting pregnant? You can jump out of a plane, and the chute may not open. There will no doubt be injuries that medical science cannot fix.That brings up a point, is being pregnant, the same as being injured?It's going to come down to the definition of accident again, isn't it?

Not so easy, RR. when it comes to laws regarding persons, Dictionary.com holds no sway in a courtroom.We've all been using the terms human life and person in a colloquial manner so far. Strictly speaking, termination of pregnancy laws do not regard the foetus as a constitutional person.This is a person who is entitled to the rights accorded to him / her by the constitution; and is defined on the basis of what the constitution regards as a person.
I don't think, however, that many constitutions specifically define what a person is, so the definition is based on the context in which it is used.It should be noted that some laws are also informed by biological instances of what could be regarded as personhood. Using Brain Birth and Viability as markers.

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Since when is it a right to be able to have sex without the possibility of getting pregnant?

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Since it became possible.

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"These monkeys are at once the ugliest and the most beautiful creatures on the planet./ And the monkeys don't want to be monkeys; they want to be something else./ But they're not."
-- Ernie Cline

No, immediate. Oh, because the fetus just happened to crawl inside the uterus when the mother accidentally left it somewhere? C'mon. Intruder is the appropriate term. If they 1) had no right to be on your boat in the first place; 2) put your boat and your life at risk by their presence there, and 3) there was absolutely no other safe way to get them off the boat, then yes, it's their fault. Absolutely no one has the right to live inside another human being against that person's will. Absolutely no one has the right to use the body resources of another person, even if their life depends on it.That's the same principle, after all, that enjoins sick people from strapping you down and "donating" one of your kidneys against your will. Nonsense. Every woman who is pregnant has complications - lasting effects on her body as a result of pregnancy. There's no such thing as a "simple" pregnancy, as any doctor can tell you.

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A fetus of enough age can dream, explore its environment, express some basic emotion, etc.

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So can most animals. Yet, I can't quite fathom that a mosquito has anything like we would call a consciousness. One must be careful about anthropomorphizing behavior,-

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I would, like I said above, draw it at whatever age we can detect higher order brain function.

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Is there a definition of detectable higher order brain function? Or am I, a partial vegetarian, going to have to give up eating fish?-

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The problem is exactly as you say though, once we outline the gray area how do we draw the line.

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Yes, and of course we also have to agree on what constitutes a gray area. So far, even the consideration of consciousness as a criterion isn't universal.
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Since we do consider infanticide murder....

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This was an pretty arbitrary designation by the early Christian missionaries of Europe. Most societies did't consider infanticide as murder, and even in Christian Europe the hierarchy had a hard time suppressing the practice.Designating infanticide as murder was just as arbitrary as the later designation of abortion as murder. It may be that if we could establish a reasonable criterion for when abortion is allowed, we may find that we should limit it to the first trimester as you feel; on the other hand, it is possible that once a reasonable criterion is decided upon, and after studying the issue closely, we will find that infanticide up to a certain age should be allowed. That is one of the problems with searching for a rational basis for ethics; one may end up realizing that for consistency one should be advocating positions that one would not have thought possible.One is then left with a dilemma: form the basis of one's ethics purely on one's gut feelings, risking a fairly arbitrary (and non-universal) set of ethics; or coming up with a rational basis that more or less agrees with one's basic feelings and that others might agree with, but from which one can draw unexpected conclusion.Edited by Chiroptera, : changed the tense of a verb

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"These monkeys are at once the ugliest and the most beautiful creatures on the planet./ And the monkeys don't want to be monkeys; they want to be something else./ But they're not."
-- Ernie Cline

Yes, there is a difference, and there is a difference between deciding to become pregnant and becoming involuntarily pregnant, whether as a consequence of rape, contraceptive failure, or one too many martinis ("I love a martini,/two at the most:/ three I'm under the table,/ four I'm under my host."), and none of these are likely to produce a human life destined for fulfillment.You confuse me, rR. I thought you opposed abortion based on the sanctity of human life, believing that the fertilized ovum is a human being. The child of rape is no less innocent than the child of loving straight married parents who support the death penalty.If it's not about punitively controlling female sexuality, why does the rightness or wrongness of an abortion hinge on whether the woman participated willingly? We have many powers; we have many responsibilities; we have many choices. One of those choices is to not allow a pregnancy to come to term; women have been making that choice for millennia. Who can reasonably take the responsibility of that choice away from them?Why do the religious so often seek secular power to control the choices and responsibilities of others? If Christians don't abort, and Christians hate to see others abort, then they should evangelize more efficiently and make more Christians, not try to become the God Squad.

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Agreed. But risk implies potential, not immediate, danger.

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Well, then the question is if the government has the right to force someone to take on risk unwillingly.

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If we extract DNA from a zygote, will they appear as human?

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We can extract DNA from a pimple on someon'e ass and it will appear as human DNA.

So anything that has human DNA and is alive is a person? If that is your only criteria for being a person then is my fingertip a person. The hair that came out on my brush, are those people?

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Of course, biblical creationists are committed to belief in God's written Word, the Bible, which forbids bearing false witness; --AIG (lest they forget)

Since we are talking about personness and not mosquitoness your point pretty much does not further the discussion. We are trying to define when a developing human becomes a person.I am going to respond to the rest of your post but I must ask why you didn't address what I felt was my main point about basing the decision off of what is knowable about a fetus? Is that not a reasonable initial criteria for making a decision? You are side stepping my point. We are not talking about fishiness nor do we consider a fetus our prey. My point is simply that the only thing we can know about our sentience is that it is congruent to our ability for higher order brain function. In the future we may be able to associate sentience with something more specific or there may already be a way for us to do that now that I don't know about.I seem to remember hearing that we have a way to detect when high order brain function begins for a particular fetus. This seems to be a good canidate for a cutoff point. I would like to discuss THAT and not some distraction relating a fetus to a variety of other animals. We will always be able to compare the cognitive ability of a baby to that of some animal. That does not translate though into conclusion that because that animal is not a person that the child is also not a person. At least I do not see the objectivity in that line of reasoning. Well that depends on if we base our decision, like I said, on what is knowable. I seem to have this belief that consciousness does not begin with higher order brain function but I don't really have any other criteria for identifying that point OTHER than the identification of the start of higher order brain function. The problem with extending the line forward from that point is that we cannot find an objective critera. In reality it may be different for the individual. Maybe some children gain consciousness at 1 year while others do not until 5 years. What is the objective criteria? If you dont have any then you potentially are murdering a lot of real "people". No not necessarily. According to the law birth is the critera for personhood. Therefore technically aborting a fetus 5 mins before it is born is not murder while killing it 5 mins after it is born is. Also, it seems to be that most people think that killing babies is wrong. While this idea, and the law, may change, I was commenting on the current view regarding infanticide. Sure. I agree with you. What I am asking is what is that "reasonable criteria". Although since we are talking about life and death here it may be better to set the bar at higher than "reasonable". I prefer, as I have said before, an objective definition of the beginning of sentience before I would ever feel comfortable playing with the life of a potential person.Overall I think we are saying the same sort of thing. I just don't know of any criteria past the beginning of higher order brain function as an objective test for sentience. Do you?

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Of course, biblical creationists are committed to belief in God's written Word, the Bible, which forbids bearing false witness; --AIG (lest they forget)

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We can extract DNA from a pimple on someon'e ass and it will appear as human DNA.

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Was that pimple the result of rape or incest?

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"These monkeys are at once the ugliest and the most beautiful creatures on the planet./ And the monkeys don't want to be monkeys; they want to be something else./ But they're not."
-- Ernie Cline

I'm where you are. I'd consider "higher order brain activity" a sign of incipient humanity. Limiting abortions to the first trimester (except in extenuating circumstances) is, I think, appropriate.

No, potential.
If, after a night of binge-drinking, a man stumbles his way home, only to accidently end up in someone else's house (which the owners carelessly left unsecured), and passes out in the lounge. In the morning he wakes up, with the owner holding a gun to his face.By your reasoning, the owner has a right to kill him, then and there. Even tho' the poor sod meant no one any harm.The threat is regarded as immediate, only as soon as violence against the owner is initiated. The mother left her uterus "unattended" the moment she and her partner neglected to properly use protection. (does not apply to those who do) Now, in principle, i tend to agree with this. However, i realise that things sometimes aren't this black and white. If it was, courts would have no problem regarding the foetus as a constitutional person. Bogus analogy. Since in the above example, there is clear intent to commit grievious bodily harm. A very large number of women in this world do not have access to adequate (sometime no) medical care. I don't see every single one of them dying from pregnancies.
Again, one can't conflate potential danger with immediate danger.

Not necessarily so. When a pregnancy becomes, or shows signs of becoming, an immediate threat, then things become significantly clearer, and measures can be put in place to diffuse the situation, including abortion.
This way, the baby isn't being thrown out with the bath water (sorry, couldn't think of a more fitting idiom).

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Not necessarily so. When a pregnancy becomes, or shows signs of becoming, an immediate threat, then things become significantly clearer, and measures can be put in place to diffuse the situation, including abortion.
This way, the baby isn't being thrown out with the bath water (sorry, couldn't think of a more fitting idiom).

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But we aren't talking about "imminent threat", we are taling about "risk".Every single pregnancy that every single woman experiences entails risk.Can the government force a citizen to take on risk against their will?