I’d be interested in knowing where you stand on Peter Singer’s book, “Practical Ethics”. You know where he says that it’s fine to kill a handicapped newborn on the spot, or even up to one year if the parents wish it. And you think I am extreme?

LV, Singer is a utilitarian (well, a preference utilitarian if you want to get specific) and his argument is more than a little different than those being made here. Singer has attempted to define personhood by the characteristics necessary to be considered to be a rights-bearing individual and he regards delivery of a fetus as an arbitrary point for assessing personhood. That’s *not* the point any of us are making.

I guess I should be sorry if this comes off as snide, but I’m really not. No, LV. Newborn babies are born, their ability to exist without being attached to life support in the form of another human. I’m not advocating killing newborn babies, nor would I. LV, we’re down to arguing semantics, so there’s really nothing else to say.

Believe me, I’ve had this argument with myself many times a long time ago. It always ends up at the same place. For some, their ethics are okay with forcing pregnancy. For others, their ethics are not.

Question.
When your elderly relative, your mom for example, becomes totally dependant on you for food, will you kill her too?

Mom was hooked up to machines when she died, not my kidneys, circulatory system, brain, etc.

So, no. Try again.

Would my mother have an umbilical cord attached to me, siphoning off nutrients from my body? Because otherwise, your argument is not about what I have said.

None of which are relevant as such that you can site them to deny the unborn’s humanity or right to life.

I think if there were a way to keep the fetus alive without needing the mother, it may be unethical to kill the fetus, but since there is no artificial womb yet invented, your morals force a system of rights on a woman that are unequal for her. This is morally wrong.

btw, driving does not create another life, sexual activity can. Apples and oranges…….Question.

Driving is an act. An accident and injury is a possible consequence. Sex is an act. Pregnancy is a possible consequence. My broken arm from the car crash can be mended via medical treatment. A woman’s fetus can be aborted. The “create another life” part is sophistry, as it neglects the fact that the fetus does not have a right to use the women without her consent.

And, for what it’s worth, I spent a year and a half watching my grandmother slowly waste away after a diabetic stroke. She lost both her legs due to poor circulation, and my mother and I had to apply ointment to her bed sores. She, herself, was suffering from extreme dementia the whole time. I helped feed her and did all those things because she was a born person, my grandmother, and I could do them. Forcing me to attach myself to her as a life support is something I might have consented to, but to do so would require my consent.

This is non sequitur, since the supposed “benefit” is bringing the situation back to normalcy. No person has the right to use someone else’s body as a physical food supply, or to put it another way, no one has the right to use another person’s body to benefit themselves by stealing their nutrients to survive. If the fetus is a person, it should be able to abide by these rules of conduct. Else, you grant it more rights than you grant everyone else, and you do so at the detriment to women only.

The phrase “human being” obfuscates the very real moral and ethical problems of saying that a fetus is a person, with full rights, but regardless, if it were a person, it has no more rights than the rest of us, and I can’t use your body as nourishment, just like you can’t use mine, and a fetus can’t use a woman’s, without the consent of the person providing the nourishment. If a woman doesn’t consent to being an incubator, the fetus has to get out. Furthermore, having sex is not consenting to giving up your rights to not let someone else to hook themselves up to you for food. Driving your car is not consenting to having to deal with broken bones without medical assistance in the event of an accident. Your argument is based on sentimental platitudes that have no basis in anything but your opinion that women do not have the right to say “no”. I predict you’ll continue to obfuscate, as that is the only argument any of you ever have.

Yup, I’m from Hawaii (well, mostly, I was born on the mainland, but we moved to Hawaii when I was young). It very different being white in Hawaii, you are a minority. Actually everyone is a minority since there is no majority ethnic group. Not to mention there is so much inter-racial marriage and children that no one really thinks of it. When my husband (then boyfriend) and I moved to North Carolina it was extreme culture shock. (For example I had never thought of the two of us as an interracial couple until we were told that that was the reason we couldn’t get a certain apartment.)

Living away from Hawaii (particularly seeing how my husband is treated in comparison to how I’m treated) has given me a lot of observations about race…I haven’t been able to process them into anything that makes sense. I’m just generally angry about it. :)

Ignoring the rest of your obfuscations, taking this at face value implies that women also have the right to use another person’s physical body as a food supply via some mechanism of physical attachment. You imply that fetuses have this right, and if their rights are equivalent to a woman’s rights, then the woman also is able to do this. As this is not the case in any society or any system of ethics I am aware of, your argument falls apart, as you are obviously giving more rights to the fetus than the woman by virtue of who they are, not their humanity. Starting from first principles, your argument is fallacious.