Texas passes law on abortion, limits to six weeks to get it done

[tempogain]

@Brendon

Abortion is ethical. From there I’m trying to find both axioms and logic to reach that conclusion.

That’s not really a great way of coming to conclusions, if I may say so. But I suspect you know that You should at least stay epistemologically open to the possibility that abortion is not ethical.

[Mithrandir]

@Brendon

But your position is that the baby’s right to life overrides the woman’s right to choice, isn’t it?

No, and I’ve been very clear on this point.

@Mithrandir

As I affirmed many times above, there is a lot of truth to the proposition of a sliding scale of legal protections for unborn babies depending on developmental stage.

@Mithrandir

Well, I care about all human life. It doesn’t mean that I’ll treat all human life the same regardless of the circumstances. I make rules for a living, and I prefer black and white ones to fuzzy ones (and in the AI and analytics work I do I am forced to use black and white rules). Unfortunately, black and white rules don’t work too well in this space. This is more true of the legal issues, but also applies to a lesser extent to the moral issues in this case.

@Mithrandir

TG rightly points out that there is a conflict of rights associated with this issue, but that doesn’t mean that it isn’t a moral framework from which to proceed to discuss the issue.

@Mithrandir

No, I’ve explicitly contradicted this point, as have others. There is more than one right.

[Brendon]

@tempogain

That’s not really a great way of coming to conclusions, if I may say so.

In theory I agree, but I also kinda think it’s what we all do. Anyone who claims to have derived their whole worldview from first principles is kidding themselves. Asking “why do I believe this?” seems worthwhile.

And I’m certainly open to the possibility, but to be persuaded I’ll need something more than assertions to the contrary.

[Mithrandir]

@Brendon

Sort of, yes! I already have my conclusion :

That’s a path to justification, not to reasoned opinion.

[Mithrandir]

@tempogain

If you have to find an approach, it kind of seems like you already have your own axiom and are only seeking to justify it.

Damn, you beat me to it.

[Brendon]

@Mithrandir

Again, this is indeed a moral issue. On one side we have an innocent human life, and on the other we have a mother who has her own issues wrestle with. Even if the consequences of the decision were equal, I’d go for the innocent human life. But the consequences are overwhelmingly asymmetric.

This is what I was referring to, I guess. Perhaps I misinterpreted.

@Mithrandir

That’s a path to justification, not to reasoned opinion.

Indeed. As I wrote above, I am pretty suspicious of claims to reasoned opinion.

[tempogain]

@Brendon

Asking “why do I believe this?” seems worthwhile.

Sure. It sounds like you’re saying you believe it, without full evidence to support it. Now you’re looking for evidence. We should try to stay clear about what we’re doing though, lest we convince ourselves too strongly on the basis of poor evidence.

Why do you believe so firmly that abortion is ethical, if I may ask? Breaking that down might help you get to the heart of things.

[Mithrandir]

@Brendon

This is what I was referring to, I guess. Perhaps I misinterpreted.

I think you made unwarranted assumptions based on that statement, which I stand by completely.

@Brendon

Indeed. As I wrote above, I am pretty suspicious of claims to reasoned opinion.

Skepticism is good. But we should still endeavor to achieve logical conclusions based on reason. We all may fall short, but you seem to be embracing justification over an attempt at reasoned opinion.

[Brendon]

@tempogain

Why do you believe so firmly that abortion is ethical, if I may ask? Breaking that down might help you get to the heart of things.

I’m not sure why, but my thing above about community impact is my current best attempt to break it down.

@Mithrandir

We all may fall short, but you seem to be embracing justification over an attempt at reasoned opinion.

Yeah, I think that’s true. I don’t have any convenient axioms to proceed from, so I have to work backward from whatever moral intuition I have about specific cases.

[fonserbc]

@nz

If you think not having a guarantee that a fetus, which, when born, is quite clearly a human, does not deserve quality of life, then you have a very messed up idea of what “life” is.

To be honest, I think this is the main point of cognitive dissonance in this topic.

The understanding of what life is.

Imo, Life does not just start, life is all around us all the time, and has been for many millennia.
Humans are life. Two people making love are life. A bunch of cells dividing inside an uterus is also life. We have billions of live bacteria in our hands that are life, billion of ants in the earth, trillions of algae floating in the sea. Everything life. All the time, all around us.

I feel many people in this topic who are pro-life attribute a certain value to a human life, something countable and different than other life. Something that needs to be protected from being destroyed. Even though, in my point of view, this “human life” does not matter unless we take care of it.

Also there is the recurrent mention to “the human that could have been” of an aborted foetus.
Yeah there is a lot of missed potential, but there is an immense amount of potential also being lost in the life of the mother that can’t abort, in the life of a child growing up without the proper support (monetary, educational, you call it).

Protecting a human-to-be but not protecting the existing humans is, in my opinion, the greatest hypocrisy of pro-life arguments.

Shouldn’t we prevent human lifes from suffering? Shouldn’t that be more important?
Is the foetus suffering if we abort it? Or will it suffer if it lives in a shitty situation? What do you care more about?
Give people support to make the decisions that will make them suffer the least.

[tempogain]

@fonserbc

I feel many people in this topic who are pro-life attribute a certain value to a human life, something countable and different than other life.

We all do that to some degree at least, don’t we? Most people very clearly so. We’re generally speciest to some degree.

@fonserbc

Even though, in my point of view, this “human life” does not matter unless we take care of it .

Let me take that to an absurd conclusion in the hope of understanding you better. I don’t take care of you, do I? Outside of a very minimal amount of taxes I pay which are applied to you in some way. Some fraction of a penny, I’d guess. Should I say that your life does not matter to me more than that?

[fonserbc]

My life should not matter to you more than the life of everybody else you don’t know.

But I hope you care for my life the same you care for the people you know.
As in: we should care for all the human life the same.

(That’s kinda what I tried to steer that paragraph towards but in hindsight, I think I failed on that regard )

[Brendon]

@tempogain

We all do that to some degree at least, don’t we? Most people very clearly so. We’re generally speciest to some degree.

Not me! If I have to choose between my dog and some random person I don’t know, Sunshine wins every time.

[tempogain]

@fonserbc

My life should not matter to you more than the life of everybody else you don’t know.

But I hope you care for my life the same you care for the people you know.
As in: we should care for all the human life the same.

At least, I shouldn’t want you to be wantonly killed, should I? From a belief that life has value? Or for no other reason than if you can be wantonly killed, it implies that I or others can as well?

[tempogain]

@Brendon

Not me! If I have to choose between my dog and some random person I don’t know, Sunshine wins every time.

That’s one limited exception for you. How about mosquitos or weeds?

[Brendon]

@tempogain

That’s one limited exception for you. How about mosquitos or weeds?

Kill 'em all. But at risk of beating the same horse, Sunshine gets an exception because I have an emotional connection with her, not because she’s a dog. And I think broadly we apply the same metric to people. Except for those bleeding-heart liberals, of course

[tempogain]

But I hope you would save a person before like a gecko or something Emotional connection or not

[Brendon]

ambiguous silence

[jinyu]

Apologies for writing this rather quickly, without the linguistic precision befitting such a difficult legal and ethical topic. My position on whether there should be laws restricting abortion is based on the idea that:

1. The right of people to do what they want with their own bodies is a fundamental principle of modern Western ethics and jurisprudence. To restrict it is bad. I don’t think there’s any controversy about this. The question is how much weight the badness of violating this basic fundamental right is given vis-à-vis other considerations in the case of abortion, conscription, suicide, forced vaccinations, or, to give a ridiculous extreme example that would be uncontroversial, forcing someone to have their pinkie cut off to placate the aliens threatening to destroy planet Earth). No matter how fundamental this right is, it is always possible to imagine scenarios where almost everyone will agree that other considerations should outweigh it. But because it’s such a fundamental right, the burden should be on the side wanting to violate it that the harm avoided massively outweighs the infringement of the right. In the case of such basic rights a dissymmetry should exist in weighing them up with possible harms: they should be quasi-inviolable.

2. At some time prior to delivery aborting a foetus is bad for the sake of that person, person-to-be, entity, being itself. At an early state of pregnancy I don’t believe aborting a foetus is bad for the foetus itself (the question of when life begins is irrelevant to this question). I don’t think, however, think that there should be any controversy that aborting a 9 month old foetus is bad for that foetus itself. It is something that, everything else being equal, we would have a strong ethical duty to avoid. A serious ethical conflict therefore exists between wanting to preserve the woman’s basic right to choose what she does with her body and wanting to preserve the life of the foetus for its own sake once it has reached a certain stage of development.

My position is that the woman’s fundamental right to choose should not be legally infringed however, after a certain point, possibly twelve weeks, abortion should not be available on request but would require some kind of approval. My reasoning is that 1. Late stage pregnancies, based on everything I understand of embryology and philosophy, are ethically much worse than earlier ones, and 2. Such restrictions on abortion after, say, 12 weeks, do infringe on the woman’s right to choose, but her rights are much less significantly infringed in this situation where she has the possibility of deciding to have an abortion, but not, necessarily, the right to delay. I remain vague about what form such approvals for abortions in later stage pregnancy might take that would discourage late stage abortions while still allowing exceptions in circumstances where there were reasons. On the one hand, if approval for late stage abortions were automatically granted in all cases, a mere formality, it would be pointless. On the other, there are obvious objections to a woman being forced to justify herself to access an abortion (although one could imagine the process of approval for later stage abortions being done respectfully, non-judgmentally, while still legally requiring substantive justification).

[Brendon]

@jinyu

(although one could imagine the process of approval for later stage abortions being done respectfully, non-judgmentally, while still legally requiring substantive justification).

What I can immediately imagine is the approval process taking 3-4 years