The bible and abortion

Isn't there a section in Leviticus about the state's right to colonize a woman's uterus?I think it was near all that stuff about how you're supposed to beat a gay guy with hammers to show God's love.

Every time a man masturbates, or a woman ovulates, it had the potential to be a human with brain function. The logical result of this argument is that we should be forcibly impregnating women from the time of their first period. Slightly beforehand even, just to be on the safe side.

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Yes, I'm well aware of this complication. All I can say is that the chances of particular sperm impregnating an egg is vanishingly small.

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But the chances of a full load of semen is quite another story. I can't actually speak for anyone else, but I know that when I ejaculate, considerably more than one sperm cell comes out.

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Would you of wanted someone to abort you when you were developing?

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What are you asking? Would I, a thinking human, want to be aborted, would would proto-Dan, the blob of cells in his mother's womb, have wanted to be aborted?Well, I can tell you that I would certainly not want to be aborted. But I really don't think proto-Dan would have had an opinion on the subject, any more than the grass really has an opinion when you use the lawnmower.

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Aren't you basically denying a humans right to existance by aborting them before they can develop?

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You can't deny rights to something that doesn't exist.Honestly here... my girlfriend and I have been together for three and a half years. In that time, we could feasibly have had two children, possibly upwards of three or four. I could knocked her up at least twice.There are no odds, or ambiguous potential on that. To my knowledge, neither of us are infertile, and we have sex quite regularly. So that's two humans denied the right to exist by our murderous use of birth control, if we stick with this argument.Meanwhile, there's a girl in the apartment across the hall. I could easily be impregnating her as well. No vague possibilities here; enough unprotected sex and I would impregnate her. Am I denying a potential human the right to life by not doing so?

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That's an excessive generalisation, Dan. A fetus will become a human if not aborted. Well, more or less baring a natural miscarriage, etc. A sperm, or an egg, won't. In fact it doesn't even contain a full genome. That's a significant difference.

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How come? There is sperm in my testicles. There is an egg in my girlfriend's fallopian tubes. Keep adding sperm to egg, and it will become a human as well. By not combining the sperm with the egg, are we denying people the right to live?Bring on the ladies! I've got to stand up for the rights of some potential people!

I realize that I'm being smarmy. In all seriousness, I'm against second-trimester abortions for the simple reason that at that point I don't know whether the fetus has become human life or not. Best to err on the side of caution, I think, and I don't think it's unreasonable to ask a woman to make up her mind after missing her third period.It's this pre-emptive denying of life idea I take issue with.

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Why stop at sperm though? When your girlfriend is eating her toast that toast could be contributing to a new life! It's clearly murder not to eat the toast!

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Yes! This is why I feel this argument is silly.

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You are not intervening in an already started process. You are simply not starting that process. The two are in no way equivalent.

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I could have sworn that her menstrual cycle and my ejaculation were the start of the process.

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It does exist though. Its on its way to become just like you and me.

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Do you realize that the second part of this contradicts the first?I mean... yes, there is a thing there. It is certainly a collection of cells. But no human exists at that point.

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You are making the extremely low odds of one of your sperm fertilizing an egg zero. To me, this seems different than making the very high odds of a zygote becoming a human zero.

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The odds of one of my sperm fertilizing an egg are not low. If my girlfriend and I have unprotected sex every day, I will impregnate her.So by not doing so, am I denying the right to life to the child we would have?[This message has been edited by Dan Carroll, 09-24-2003]

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Do you think at one point it becomes a 'human'? And that one day before this its alright to abort the baby? You shouldn't just look at what it is, you should take into account what its becoming.

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I haven't tried to nail down the exact point at which it becomes human. As I said earlier, the second trimester is a little too hazy for my tastes. But early enough on, you can definitely say, "that isn't a person."However, if we work under the assumption that it is human all along, I still have to bring it back to asking why the separate egg and sperm are not human as well.

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Say someone is painting a masterpiece. Can we just look at it halfway through and say, "This isn't a masterpiece, so I'm going to throw it out." You have to look at what its becoming, and not what it is.

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You and I don't have the right to throw it out. But the painter certainly does. I don't care if they've already bought the canvas and started mixing paints. They are under no obligation to give the world a masterpiece if they don't want to do so.It's a bad analogy though, because the painter also has the right to throw the painting out after it can be called a masterpiece.

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FYI, I'm not sure where I stand on this issue. I have to write a biomedical ethics paper soon and am just throwing around some ideas.

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Cool. I hope you post the paper when it's done.

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Actually, it isn't so easy to come by here in America.

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A friend of mine in college (this was maybe three years ago) had a woman at a free clinic tell her that there was no morning after pill, and that she didn't know what my friend was talking about.

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There is no exact point in which it becomes human. That's just an arbitrary dichotomy in a continuum. I think you know this though. That's why I don't think you can arbitrarily define one point as "human" and then base its moral status on that.

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There are different ends of a spectrum though, with "definitely human" at one end, and "definitely not human" at the other. It's somewhere in between where things get hazy. But that doesn't mean you don't have a good long stretch of "not human" at the beginning.

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How would you decide whether it is human enough to forbid its termination? Say we let the end of the second trimester be that point, then what about a day before that? Doesn't that seem absurd that one day we can abort then the day after we can't?

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Think of it as the same as driving laws. Is it a little silly that on your sixteenth birthday you can drive, and the day before you couldn't? Sure. But you've gotta make the cutoff point somewhere, right? We can't have two year olds trying to drive cars, because that would be downright silly and dangerous.So we cut it off where we know it's safe. Sixteen and up? Yeah, you can trust them behind the wheel if they've been taught right. Fifteen... eh... kinda hazy. Probably varies person to person. So we'd better play it safe and stick with sixteen.