[Abortion Thread] (POLL 4) A compromising position...

[Cultural Posadism]

https://righttolife.org.uk/news/former-nurse-reveals-babies-born-alive-are-left-to-die-could-soon-be-reality-for-northern-ireland

Calling her a nurse seems rather misleading, when Jill Stanek's primary role is being an anti-abortion lobbyist and a liar.

[Molither]

It's about choice, when it comes to abortion, just as pro-life is about life, when it comes to abortion. The names are intended to function as an argument. As descriptors they're not great, pro-choice could just as easilly be about bump stocks.

No. Pro-choice is a useful shorthand which honestly conveys the signal that abortion is up to the choice of the woman, while "pro-life" is a murky and dishonest attempt to act like they're for life when actually they're fine with terrorist movements, wars, people dying from easily preventable diseases, crippling poverty etc. Pro- or anti-choice get to the relevant part in the most honest way possible.

Plus, unlike most forms of contraception you already exist before being aborted. Fetuses feel pain as early as 12 weeks’ gestation. In my opinion that is the point where afterwards having an abortion is unethical, as you are subjecting a human life however small it may be to pain. I disagree with the view that a Fetus is a burden and therefore people should have the right to abort it. It's a slippery slope and similar arguments were used by the Nazis to justify their euthanasia program against the disabled.

I don't know what "most forms" of contraception are, but all hormonal forms of contraception work by preventing implantation, which is to say, a potentially viable and impregnated egg is expelled post-conception. That's why some southern US states would have outlawed hormonal birth control if their personhood bills went through.
To the best of my knowledge, foetuses do not feel pain at 12 weeks, as their nervous system develops much later. I'm sure you have a good source to say otherwise, though.
"Human life" reveals you don't know enough on the topic to have an informed opinion.
I'm sure you'll take over the pain of bearing the child, the cost of raising it and everything, right? After all, it's not a burden. Oh, and do this for every non-aborted foetus in your country.
And lastly, we get to the Nazi references. Yeah. Though of course Nazis were also anti-choice (Forced abortion for some, outlaw abortions for others), so in reality, you're the one on Team Nazi. If you go with the pro-choice position, there's actually something wrong with forcing people to either abort or not abort against their will.

Edit: And because I swear I had something for this:

I am writing this in order to outline why we ought to minimise abortions, but also why we ought to allow abortions. I will try to offer a better use of “person” and “personhood”, which will not only be superior because it is philosophically grounded and consistent, but also because it works in other areas such as law or commerce. This last part is also a clarion call to my fellow pro-choice advocates to be careful about their use of certain words.

Terminology, in so many words.
First, however, a few words on words. I use “pro” and “anti-“”choice” rather than “-life” for three reasons. First, it’s fundamentally a question of whether a woman should have a choice. Life is a multitude of things, and being “pro” life is often a vacuous way of saying that women should not have a choice. Policies that give people (Or indeed living things) a better life are separate from any policy on abortions, and both pro- and anti-choice advocates can be for or against these policies independent of their stance on abortion. Being “pro” life is as meaningful as being “pro” good and “anti” bad. “Pro” life is a convenient rebranding of the issue.
Second, though related, I don’t actually believe most of these alleged “pro” life advocates. In other areas than abortion, they often happily advocate death and destruction, whether assault on and murder of doctors, wars in the Middle East, cuts to healthcare- and social services, and many other policies that either directly kills people or makes a decent life harder to accomplish. Furthermore, my anecdotal (But I am pretty sure I’d be able to back it up with statistical evidence if I put in an effort) observation is that almost all anti-choice advocates are also against enlightened ways to incentivise more children, such as child support, free healthcare, free education and the like. I have yet to see an anti-choice advocate in the media who is not also advocating for a return to a patriarchal family and family planning; i.e. most anti-choice advocates are anti-abortion for more or other concerns than life.
Third, “pro-“ or “anti-“ abortion is a nonsensical label. Unless a person is advocating more, or forced, abortions, it is safe to assume that they are anti-abortion in some form or another – a question of means and ethics, rather than ends. They may even be against having abortions themselves, depending on their personal stance on the issue. Some in this thread have proclaimed themselves to be anti-abortion but pro-choice. The question is thus not in any meaningful way whether you want more or fewer abortions, or whether you would contemplate having one yourself, or advice your partner to have one, but rather whether you want your personal preferences to be the legal requirements for everyone else. Abortion is a question of policy for everyone, not what you personally might do.
Regarding the words “human” and “person”, they have almost interchangeable use in common parlance. However, when we are talking about “personhood” and when one becomes a person, compared to being human, the differences are crucial to avoid conflating causes and effects, and overlapping but distinct categories. As such, “human” here is either (a) member(s) of our subspecies, homo sapiens sapiens, or the adjective, something that is of or by members of said specie (“Human DNA”, “human reaction” etc).
“Person” is here a member of the category of beings with the trait of having personhood, as I elaborate later. It is overlapping with most humans, but would also include any hypothetical sapient spacefaring aliens. As I explain subsequent, it is also the state of being where you have legal rights and obligations (In English law terminology AFAIK “natural person”). I use “legal entity” when referring to any entity, such as corporation, collective, state, etc., that also has rights and obligations, but does not have personhood. This is not the normal usage in law where I live (Where “legal person” would be the accurate translation), but it makes it less confusing to be talking about natural versus legal persons.
I try to use specific terms for the stages of human development and legality. “Children”, “baby”, “toddler” etc. are terms that refer to offspring after birth, “zygote”, “embryo”, “foetus” etc. refer to offspring while still in some stage of prenatal development. “Homicide” is when a person kills another person (From Latin, ‘the killing of a human’), but without or before any legal judgement. “Justified homicide” is a legal killing, for instance self-defence, and “manslaughter” is an unintended, accidental, or non-malicious killing, but one where the killer is still punished. “Murder” is an intended, planned or malicious killing of another person with the associated long sentence. While there are several distinctions between various jurisdictions on what constitutes justified homicide, manslaughter and murder, I think my intended meaning comes across.
Lastly, “life” simply uses a common biological definition: Homeostasis, cells, metabolism, grow, adapt, react to external environment and capable of reproduction. This places humans alongside our fellow animals in Kingdom Animalia, and our fellow multi-celled organisms in the Eukaryote Domain, and within the Tree of Life as a whole. While religious groups may want to talk about their divine being(s) and soul(s), I prefer to plant my philosophy and policy preferences on ground as close to objective reality as possible.
With these distinctions out of the way, I can get to the meat of my project.

Why abortions ought to be as few as possible.
Abortions aren’t without consequences. The medical effects of messing with the human body in this way are seldom harsh, but they are there even when mild. Most abortions happen at a time where the procedure can be done with a pill, potentially even in the women’s own home, with limited adverse effects and few risks of side-effects. Late-stage abortions are often comparatively riskier, though in the grand scheme of things, modern medicine has made abortion safe in most instances. Still, there are non-zero risks involved with abortions. This is a point where pro- and anti-choice actually agree, though with different emphasis. Even if we leave aside the oft-overstated risks that the anti-choice advocates offer for restrictions on abortions, we also have to consider the health risks of being pregnant and giving birth.
Without being a doctor, I can hardly give a medical evaluation of the associated risks with either. Going through both my own country’s Ministry of Health websites and the CDC, however, the list of risks involved with abortion is substantially shorter than the combined list of risks with a continued pregnancy and a birth, and any risk with abortion is also included in the list of pregnancy and birth risks. When considering the peer reviewed literature, it seems clear to me that the mortality risks are simply not comparable [1]; the mortality rate for births are roughly 15 times as high as abortion, and that risk is obfuscating a stark difference in abortion risks over time [2].
While abortions are safer than birth, that still leaves abortion as a non-zero risk for the zero gain of reverting to a state of non-pregnancy. We should clearly not invite people to take a risk with their bodies without mitigation. Luckily, contraception is a thing.
While medical complications as area can only be improved through scientific research and improvement, social condemnation is an aspect that we can evaluate and improve separately. This also ties in to mental issues. It is currently a fact that terrorist organisations like Operation Rescue, as well as long-term US social trends, translates to ostracization of women who get abortions. Doctors who perform abortions are literally risking their life as well. The discourse is largely about judging and condemning. While I can’t get solid numbers on social effects, but must infer them from polling, we can quickly see that roughly half of the US population are “pro” life [3], and that while roughly half want to make abortion legal in ‘some circumstances’, for many people that list can be reduced to the classic “rape, incest and life of the mother”. Another 20% want it illegal in all circumstances.
While I in no way suggest that all these respondents are as extreme as, say, Keshiland has been in this thread, this polling and news stories on the subject suggest that for roughly 50-70% of the US population, abortion is a socially condemnable act, even if not legally. This will have a negative impact on the women who choose abortion, regardless of any inherent effect from the abortion itself. Numbers on e.g. post-abortion depressions are statistically not significantly different from post-birth depressions [4] when taking confounding factors into account, but this study does not take social evaluation and culture into account. This means that women who are brought up learning that abortions are evil, who subsequently have abortions, may have worse mental conditions than usual. Social evaluation of abortion can also impact women’s mental health, with any range of negative evaluations of women who have abortions, such as them being ‘slutty’, ‘unable to take care of themselves’, ‘irresponsible’, ‘murderers’ or any other list of adjectives (Just within this thread, there are numerable examples to this effect). These factors are not included in the controls of the linked study (Which I get – both because it’s not the purpose of the study, and because it’s incredibly hard to do well), which means we cannot know to what degree these adverse mental effects from abortions are biological or social in origin.
Regardless of whether mental effects are biological or social, however, they are a large part of the social discourse. Condemnation of abortion as an evil act, and hyping or overselling the medical, mental and social impacts of abortions, have been repeat offenses by the anti-choice advocates, even in this thread.
That does not invalidate the impact, though. A non-zero risk, whether medical, mental or social, is better avoided when the ‘gain’, as here, is reverting to a status quo that could be achieved without taking the risk. In other words, between staying non-pregnant and having an abortion to re-become non-pregnant, staying non-pregnant is preferable. The question on how to achieve that is not the primary subject for this debate, as it’s about family planning and contraception rather than abortion per se, but I would offer two points for consideration:
First, that abstinence-only is an abject failure in every way, shape and form [5], and the proponents of abstinence-only are directly promoting teen pregnancies, teen abortions, social ruination, adverse economic effects and more. Abstinence-only is directly responsible for more abortions, more teen pregnancies and higher STD spread rate.
Second, that while comprehensive sexual education is a right way to go, it is not the only right way to go. Colorado had a huge success with its IUD programme, which lead to a dramatic fall in unintended pregnancies, which in return lead to fewer abortions of said unintended pregnancies [6]. Offering free IUDs to women around the onset of sexual maturity is also economically viable, as the savings offset the health-costs. Furthermore, one has to assess the empowering factor of giving women control over their own reproduction, and the process of family planning that starts already when taking the IUD out, when a woman desire to get pregnant.
To sum up: For women, abortion is associated with fewer health risks than pregnancy and birth. It is comparable to birth in mental health risks, though some as-yet unaccounted-for factors may show abortion to have fewer mental health effects than birth. Social condemnation is substantial and at times dangerous. Meanwhile, to prevent abortions, one has to prevent pregnancies through comprehensive sexual education and free IUDs, while abstinence-only proponents fail at every level.

Concerning Contraception.
Not all anti-choice advocates are in disagreement with the assessment above. Some would claim that they try to empower women to avoid unintended pregnancies exactly because they want specific anti-abortion policies, so fewer or no unintended pregnancies would offset the consequences of illegal abortions. This attempted compromise-argument rests on a particular foundational falsehood: That contraception always works, and that not using contraception is blame-worthy.
Contraception failure is a wonderful example of double-think among some anti-choice advocates. The argument goes that because the number of abortions due to contraception failure is so small, we oughtn’t make abortion legal for all those who do not use contraception, or only uses it infrequently (Because, some reason, they chose not to use contraception, and thus their own carelessness got them into the mess). However, any ‘small amount’ argument would also work on the exceptions due to “rape, incest and life of the mother” that many anti-choice advocates want to allow for (And which I will address in depth later), and it counters the anti-choice advocates who decry the moral failure of late-term abortions. It also follows that if contraception had a much higher failure rate, we ought to legalise abortion for that reason, which runs counter to the argument anti-choice advocates try to make with contraception failure statistics.
Furthermore, unless an anti-choice advocate also wants to make contraception free for all forever, they need to grapple with the fact that access to contraception is not universal, and that many women, especially young or from ethnic minorities, can’t afford contraception entirely on their own [7], leading to women being blamed for not using an option they never had.
By focusing on contraception-use, anti-choice advocates sometimes try to make “sex without contraception” mean “consent to pregnancy”. There is no logical step from A to B here; the argument is a complete non-sequitur.
I would also argue that we should not limit rights by such an arbitrary punishment mentality. This doesn’t happen anywhere else; with rights to free speech, voting, search and seizure etc. Limiting e.g. rights to free speech happens mostly of concerns for other people’s rights, and not because you didn’t care enough to buy a megaphone before attending a rally. Abortion ought to be legal or illegal regardless of contraception and the efficacy thereof.
The most damning argument regarding contraception, however, comes when we consider the way contraception works, more specifically hormonal birth control like the Pill, Patch, IUDs and other. While these may influence how the egg develops and how likely sperm is to reach it, they all prevent implantation in the uterus, meaning that a potentially fertilised egg will fail to implant, and be removed with the next menstruation cycle. If one is of the opinion that “life begins at conception”, or, to put it in legal terms, that embryo have personhood, then each such failed implantation is a dead person, which merits investigation, and each use of the Pill is potentially a homicide (Legal or not). I will get back to the question of personhood and contraception; until then, just be aware that one cannot consider embryo persons if one favours contraception, and anyone arguing for personhood for embryo is implicitly arguing for convicting anyone using the Pill, Patch, IUDs and all other hormonal birth-control of murder.

Handing out memberships.
Thus far I have gone through arguments related to abortion from a viewpoint agnostic to potential rights of the foetus, because apart from the specifics of hormonal contraception and arguments regarding embryonic personhood (A point I will come back to), only the woman is a person. To argue for abortion at any time after conception, however, will quickly get the anti-choice crowd shouting “Think of the [foetus]!”
The word a philosopher would use for the group to which we ought to have ethical consideration and include in our ethical community is ‘personhood’. The term a legal scholar would use for the category of beings who has rights and obligations is also personhood. The vexing question is who are included. So, let us consider who have memberships to the personhood club.
The reason why I develop my criteria for personhood in a somewhat roundabout or abductive way is because there are several competing claims for deserving recipients of our ethical consideration. If we grant memberships one way, it may exclude some categories, and if we do it another, we may be overly inclusive. It is not necessarily the best way to present it in more formal philosophical terms, but I hope that in showing the logic at work, anti-choice proponents’ stances can have the highest possible chance of being included and thus shown why their criteria will lead them astray.
First, we might consider whether it is just human DNA that makes you included, but while this would include all humans, it would also include skin-cells, cancer-cells, corpses and atrophied limbs or organs. Meanwhile, it would exclude a hypothetical intelligent evolved or alien race who live, work, form social communities and become citizens. When we take fictional works set on Earth, say Guide to the Galaxy or Superman, we would not view Ford Prefect or Superman as non-persons, entities upon whom we can place no ethical obligations, from whom we can expect no reciprocal consideration and whom we allow no rights. They are not human, but we would be hard tried to find the criterion by which they ought to be excluded from the club. Clearly, human DNA is not a meaningful metric for inclusion in the personhood club.
Second, what about a whole human? This would solve the issues with individual cells or dead organs, but it would also exclude humans who are not whole, so loss of limb meant loss of personhood, and it would still exclude hypothetical evolved and alien races. Depending on what is meant by “whole”, it may also exclude any children under the age of 13-20. In both considered cases, we see that defining persons by their human biology is excessively restrictive to entities we would recognise as people in any social setting and any work of fiction, that is, people we (may) want to include. It may also be excessively inclusive, to the point where our cut-off hair has the same right as we do.
Do we even need a biological definition of personhood? If we develop an AI so powerful it really becomes conscious and separate from its’ programmers, would we deny it rights and obligations because it is still an electronic machine? Is it ethically justified to turn off the electricity to a conscious machine in a way that we would never allow for the forced starvation of a human? Thus, any subsequent considerations have to allow both non-human and non-biological entities as persons, so long as they are conscious.
What is distinct about being included in the personhood club? Why do we expect something of the beings we include in our ethical consideration and ethical community? I hinted at it before: We expect some measure of reciprocity; that when we ought to consider the concerns of other beings, they too ought to consider ours’. When we include a being in our ethical community, we place them under both the protection of our community, and we expect them to follow the rules in that community. Personhood requires enough self-awareness to see oneself as a part of an ethical community that provides both rights and limitations.
We can then go to a criterion that is on the right path. Sentience, the ability to experience, and especially the ability to suffer. We do explicitly confer some rights to any being we recognise as sentient, through animal cruelty laws, but do we see them as part of our ethical community? Do we need to feel obligated to afford the same rights to all animals as to humans? I would argue not; the ability to feel pain gives us an obligation to protect that being from undue pain, but merely feeling pain is not, in itself, sufficient for personhood.
The capacity for reason is another such option that, while on the right path, doesn’t give us the full picture. If we are literally unable to reason with a being, that being cannot be explained ethical considerations, and is unable to understand the concepts of an ethical community. Like sentience, however, reason alone is not sufficient, as we would lose out on why those rights would matter to a being e.g. unable to feel pain or suffering.
Lastly in our list of criteria, we need a being to be able to communicate in some way, and to be capable of self-induced activities. A being unable to communicate will also be unable to be made aware of other persons in their ethical community, and will be unable to learn of other persons’ concerns, thus be unable to take their plight into ethical consideration. Neither will they be able to express their own concerns, thus make the rest of us able of reciprocating. A being incapable of self-induced activities, whether because it is only capable of other-induced activities or unable to perform activities at all, is either a puppet, a machine or a lump, neither of which are meaningfully entities we might want to include.
Before I go over how this impacts any discussion about the ethics of abortion, I would like to take a last concept under consideration: Whether this is a yes/no or a degree discourse. Can you be more or less self-aware? Can you have more or less capacity for reason? Can you be more or less able to experience pain? Yes, so clearly each element of the admission process can be graded. Should personhood likewise be? Gradient personhood solves some problems: A baby and a toddler are not fully self-aware until between 1 and 2 years of age, and the ability to reason can be under-developed for longer. If each degree is simply better inclusion, more consideration, more voice in our ethical community, we would not have to decide when a baby becomes a person, but we can see that it is a person with fewer obligations and rights than an adult.
Thus, a sensible list of criteria for personhood are the common cognitive criteria of consciousness, reciprocity, self-awareness, sentience, capacity for reason, self-induced activities and ability to communicate, but in a gradient approach. This list is agnostic towards biology or human DNA, so any sufficiently advanced AI, any evolved animal and any alien would also be able to fit into this definition of a person (Some animal activists would argue that great apes already do).

How personhood impacts abortion
With our list, we check if a foetus has the necessary traits. Before a nervous system develops, it is unconscious, unable to reciprocate, not self-aware, not sentient, incapable of reason, has only other-induced activities and is unable to communicate. Until around 20-25 weeks, a foetus has no single necessary trait. After 26 weeks, it has a nervous system and starts some movements, that means sentience some self-induced activities. After 31 weeks, those two traits become more defined, and after 36 weeks, it is technically capable of communication. Thus, the foetus at no point reaches personhood during prenatal development, but our gradient approach means that we ought to have an increasing concern for a foetus as it develops.
Meanwhile, the woman easily fulfils all 7 criteria, meaning that we ought to afford her full ethical consideration and membership in our ethical community.
This approach to personhood also means that in any case where there is scarcity of resources, or where we have to concern ourselves with two different entities, we can evaluate to what degree they are beholden to our ethical considerations. A foetus, being a non-person human, deserves less ethical consideration than a woman, being a person and a human. Without any need to invoke self-defence, we can safely say that the bodily autonomy of a human person trumps a foetus’ non-rights.

Personhood and exceptions
Some anti-choice activists allow for a single line of exceptions: “Rape, incest and life of the mother.” This seems to be from a political analysis that these cases are especially onerous, and it is hard to argue to an electorate that a woman has to bear a child forced upon her by a rapist. However, this quickly runs into an issue, namely that these same advocates also often proclaim life or personhood to start at conception. This means that anti-choice advocates need to square the rights of foetuses based on the method of their conception, rather than any criteria based on rights. For this exception alone, under their definition of personhood, persons can lose their rights based on the acts of their parents, and (Again under their definition of personhood) be legally killed without an investigation, something we do not allow anywhere else.
For any more sensible personhood definition, this is not an issue.

Personhood and contraception
If we decide to grant personhood as I do above, there are no issues with personhood and contraception. However, if we, as I explained before, grant personhood to embryo, then each fertilised embryo that does not become a baby, is a cause for a criminal investigation into the homicide of a person. Any fertile, sexually active woman who takes the pill will need to undergo up to a monthly investigation. The GOP, when championing “personhood-bills” that establish personhood at conception, are well aware of this and the fact that they would effectively outlaw all hormonal contraception, as well as make every miscarriage a subject of a criminal investigation.

Personhood and self-defence
Most jurisdictions have some circumstances where, if you are threatened, you are allowed to defend yourself. Some jurisdictions do allow for lethal force, some do not; some require you to seek out other avenues of disengagement, some do not; some require you do disarm the threat, some do not; some require you to use an appropriate scale of responses, some do not. Common for all self-defence clauses I know of, however, is that self-defence has to be established through an investigation. Some jurisdictions bring homicides to court on principle, some can decide not to bring charges based on justified self-defence, but either way, the self-defender has to face an investigation. Some jurisdictions may not convict for murder, but for assault or manslaughter, if the self-defender can be shown to have used excessive force.
If foetuses are persons, then each abortion and miscarriage is a homicide. Potentially, so are the periods of fertile, sexually active women who are on hormonal contraception. Even if justified self-defence, and thus no sentence, facing a criminal investigation each time will not be pleasant. However, that is the necessary result of giving foetuses personhood.
This is another reason why I invested a lot of time to lay out my arguments: When pro-choice advocates allow foetal personhood because self-defence still is a thing, the consequence is an investigation to determine whether it was justified. I would therefore issue this clarion call to my fellow pro-choice advocates to refine your language and say, for example, that we don’t even allow other persons to infringe on bodily autonomy, so why would we allow a non-person to do so?

Life at conception
Since many anti-choice advocates use “life begins at conception”, I’d just point out that it’s nonsensical. All cells are alive, so the egg and the sperm were alive before conception, and bacteria are alive as well. To say that we ought to protect “life” from “conception” means we have to protect a lot of bacteria, some of which are very harmful to us. It’s either incredibly stupid or momentously meaningless.

Personhood and other laws
Personhood, as I have said before, is already a concept in law. It is how we grant rights and obligations. It is also how we distinguish between, for example, killing a pet in a cruel way (Animal cruelty), killing a pet at a veterinarian (Legal), killing a person in a cruel way (Murder with extenuating circumstances), accidental killing a person (Manslaughter) and so on.
It is also much of the legal debate about euthanasia and persons in a persistent vegetative state. If human DNA, or some other “from conception to death” definition, is our basis for personhood, then turning off life support for a PVS is murder. If the more sensible definition from above is used, that PVS may have lost personhood some time ago, and it no longer can be homicide.

Conclusion
I hope I have shown why a definition that establishes personhood at conception is unworkable, and why you ought to adopt my definition. Furthermore, I hope to have shown why contraception is not a reason to ban abortion, why abortion is safer in medical terms than going through with pregnancy and birth, and why abstinence-only is a failure in every way.


References:
[1] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/22270271
[2] http://journals.lww.com/greenjournal/Ab ... ed.20.aspx
[3] http://news.gallup.com/poll/1576/abortion.aspx
[4] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3929105/
[5] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3194801/
[6] https://www.colorado.gov/pacific/sites/ ... Report.pdf
https://www.colorado.gov/pacific/cdphe/ ... nbirthrate
https://www.nytimes.com/2015/07/06/scie ... ccess.html
[7] https://www.guttmacher.org/report/contr ... 014-update

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I have previously posted a short piece [1] on why personhood, i.e. the category of individuals we afford full legal rights, defined gradiently by the common cognitive criteria of consciousness, reciprocity, self-awareness, sentience, capacity for reason and ability to communicate, ought to be the standard on which we adjudicate the question of abortion. I also spent some time going through related subjects, like terminology, healthcare, how to prevent unwanted pregnancies, and how personhood ties in with laws in general. However, looking back on it I failed to properly expand my argument regarding the common legal exceptions to abortion restrictions, which I will attempt to rectify here. I will also reiterate my earlier clarion call for other pro-choice advocates to reconsider any self-defence arguments.
Since I posted my piece on page 417, some 70 pages have been added. While most posters rehash old, often settled, arguments, there are a few posts that I would like to respond to. I recognise that over the many pages following other posters have done so as well, but for my own peace of mind I will respond.

Reconsidering rape, incest and life of the mother
The stated logic from anti-choice advocates with these exceptions is often to avoid punishing women for actions beyond their control. A woman may be a victim of rape or incest, and it would be too onerous to demand that she carries the result of a crime to term; likewise with a pregnancy putting the life of the woman at risk. Women who have sex without protection, or where protection fails, are considered to be responsible for and having consented to the pregnancy – often with some kind of implicit shaming for the perceived promiscuousness or lack of responsibility. Accepting these exceptions will afford legislators some degree of apparent empathy, and possibly protect them from counterclaims about punishing the victims.
However, such exceptions build on foundational considerations of personhood that directly contradict other common anti-choice claims: First and foremost, allowing rape victims access to abortion is conceding a common pro-choice idea, namely that consent is crucial. A woman who did not consent to sex did not consent to becoming pregnant, and ought not be burdened with a rapist’ foetus. Furthermore, it acknowledges that a woman’s consent to sex (Which so far, by the earlier ‘logic’, means consent to pregnancy) matters more than a claim of ‘right to life’ by the foetus.
Insofar that hypothetically consensual incest exists (I.e. that not all incest is also rape, by definition) an exception for incest offers a further point: Aborting in such a case would be to avoid congenital diseases and disorders, in other words that medical reasons also supersede a foetus’ ‘right to life’. It also enables punishing what anti-choice advocates consistently claims to be a person to be punished for the hypothetically consensual acts of their parents; a thoroughly evil concept.
Lastly, ‘life of the mother’ also accepts, explicitly, that when on a balanced scale, weighing one ‘life’ against the life of a woman, the life of a woman, an actual person, weighs the most.
Any anti-choice advocate who accepts these three exceptions implicitly also accept the logic behind two of the major reasons why abortions occur, namely lack of consent to becoming pregnant, and medical reasons for either foetus or woman. This directly undermines the logic of such anti-choice advocates, as their ‘right to life’ is now subject to the woman’s consent and life, and the foetus’ congenital diseases and disorders. A woman withdrawing consent supersedes the ‘right to life’ for any anti-choice advocate who thinks these three exceptions are fair.
Their advocacy is directly antithetical of a logical underpinning to their claimed position.

A few more words on the follies of ‘human’
A lot of anti-choice advocates make a huge fuss about foeti being ‘human’, often adding developmentally and medically nonsense like ‘children’ or ‘babies’. To reiterate from my earlier piece, and common knowledge, ‘human’ is not a reason not to be removed from the body at any other occasion. ‘Human bullet’, ‘human cancer’, ‘human gangrene limb’, ‘human poison’ are most often sought removed regardless of their human production or origin. Even limiting it to ‘human DNA’ would make haircuts, appendicectomies and numerous other medical interventions illegal.
‘Human’ is a word that anti-choice advocates like to throw around. It does not mean what they want it to mean, it does not do what they want it to do, and in any policy or legal sense, it’s absolutely junk.
Without any way of separating a ‘human’ that they wish to protect, such as foeti, and a ‘human’ that they don’t, such as cancer, and still have ‘human’ mean the same thing, they are forced to rely on word-games or just hoping that no one calls them out.

Why pro-choice advocates should reconsider analogies to self-defence
I have been through the basics of this argument before, but it deserves a reemphasis: Even with the most permissive Castle Doctrine laws in the US, cases of self-defence are still investigated as homicides. Legal repercussions may be non-existent due to the nature of self-defence, but the investigation is still a lot to go through for the person subject to them, and it costs a lot of resources for the State to investigate.
Elsewhere in the US and in the world, homicides-as-self-defence may still result in various punishments if the perpetrator was found to have other avenues, such as non-lethal ways to defend themselves.
If we, as pro-choice advocates, cede the question of legal rights because we expect a combination of bodily sovereignty and self-defence to save our case, we have also ceded to the anti-choice advocates the ability to investigate any woman who has an abortion, any woman who has a miscarriage, and potentially any woman on contraception. They would be found innocent, sure, but with the anti-choice creativity for extreme legal cruelty (Such as forced vaginal ultrasound laws, waiting laws and forced written statements), we ought not give a single centimetre unless absolutely necessary.
That is why I would like to reissue my clarion call: If you think personhood or other legal delineations of rights are insignificant because women have rights to self-defence, think about the consequences of a homicide even in self-defence. Then think of an anti-choice cruelty-fetishist like Mike Pence, signatory of Indiana’s forced vaginal ultrasound law, potentially with the power to subject any women to a full police investigation. The anti-choice advocates would have a field day.
While self-defence can be a reasonable argument, we should not cede the debate on rights. If you still want to use such an argument, at least make it clear that you’re not ceding that ground. Something like “We do allow self-defence in (some) cases, against actual persons. Why should we make self-defence illegal against non-persons, effectively giving them more rights?” would do just that.

An absolute view of ‘right to life’
Some posters have tried to make an argument for an absolute right to life [2]. As the post in question starts off with assuming an absolute ‘right to life’, so it also ends up confirming it. The post in question is a finely crafted circular argument, and a few points need to be answered.
As I have said several times, ‘living’ and ‘human’ would include all kinds of cells that we would not afford rights (And, indeed, all modern countries plus many developing countries offer as a right the ability to get rid of), such as cancer. Inherent rights to life is an assumption that I need not grant. The second point jumps straight from ‘inability to consent’ to “society and individuals” has an “inherent responsibility” to protect a foetus’ “right to life on their behalf”. That simply does not follow. The error of making statements from which the conclusion does not follow is repeated in points three through five, just with some added factual errors.
Apart from these errors in establishing a positive justification for their position, there’s also, as first mentioned, the problem of circularly confirming a ‘right to life’ as an absolute. As the poster themselves later affirm, ‘right to life’ cannot be an absolute, as it is superseded in other circumstances by other rights [3].
A ‘right to life’ also has the unfortunate policy implication that organ-harvesting from people who will not die from the procedure can be allowed if it is meant to save other peoples’ lives, whereas sending soldiers off to kill other soldiers is illegal. No sound civilian would accept the former, no sound policymaker would accept the latter.
Investing too much argumentative power in a ‘right to life’ style reason for making abortion illegal has led the anti-choice advocates down a garden path with no productive end in sight.

Abortion compared to other issues
Persons having a right to bodily sovereignty does not just apply to abortions, but also a variety of other issues [4]. By its own, it would decriminalise the use of drugs (But not necessarily possession), as it would make it legal to freely consent to sex (But not necessarily demanding money) or legal to freely consent to giving away organs (But not necessarily demanding money in return). With my proposed approach to personhood, abortion would remain legal up until viability at least, but a woman would have the right to have a foetus removed from her body for longer.

Cause and responsibility
Some posters have been using sloppy arguments based on “cause” and “responsibility” [See 5, among many]. Apart from disregarding intent, quality-of-life and attempts at protection (As well as birth-control, which I go through in my earlier piece [1]), this line of argument also fails to address the notion that causing a problem unwittingly often results in rectifying or removing that problem. If people having sex are responsible for any unwanted pregnancies, then a clear response to that responsibility would be an abortion; rectifying the cause of their problem.
By advocating such a stance, anti-choice advocates ultimately argue for people to abort, rather than their oft-stated policy goal of women carrying to term and putting up for abortion. Otherwise, how can they say they have taken some personal responsibility?

Ireland
And with that being said, congratulations to Ireland for voting for rights to women, even if just for 12 weeks [6].

References
[1] viewtopic.php?f=20&t=415543&p=33188351#p33188351
[2] viewtopic.php?p=33771347#p33771347
[3] viewtopic.php?p=33772471#p33772471
[4] viewtopic.php?f=20&t=415543&p=34002542#p34002542
[5] viewtopic.php?p=34045192#p34045192
[6] http://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-44256152

I believe the state should provide universal childcare and free school meals etc. I also believe there should be more incentives to adopt, where I live we currently have a shortage of children on the adoption list. Saying that the pro life movement is terroristic is a bad faith argument. I and many others totally disavow those who'd use violence to achieve their political aims.

[Esternial]

A quick Google shows me that some research paper noticed fetuses detecting harmful stimuli at 12-ish weeks.

Putting in computer terms: you're setting up the sensors but you haven't hooked them up to the computer yet to actually read its readings or calibrate them properly.

I'd love to be proven wrong on the pain thing so that's more comforting

Given the subject there are a lot of bad actors on both sides warping the evidence to push extreme agendas. It's not easy to wade through all that and not be intimidated.

I think the main reason I'm quite skeptical of such claims is because I've studied human embryonology in university, so I feel relatively comfortable with my knowledge on the subject matter.

[Attempted Socialism]

Source?

(Warning: May be upsetting to some

https://www.standard.co.uk/hp/front/66- ... 90810.html

66 infants were born alive after NHS terminations in one year. The majority of those 66 babies took over an hour to die.

https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-47066307

Virginia late-term abortion bill labelled 'infanticide'

“If a mother is in labor...the infant would be delivered. The infant would be kept comfortable. The infant would be resuscitated if that’s what the mother and the family desired, and then a discussion would ensue between the physicians & mother - Virginia's Governor

https://righttolife.org.uk/news/former- ... rn-ireland

First, "right to life" is not a source. It's a site for disinformation.
I think you should re-read the BBC article. It does not support your claim; aborting due to health of the mother is still allowed. The 66 babies are non-viable, "major abnormalities", once you strip out the emotion and guesswork.
So in essence, you have no source for your claim. Good to know.

No. Pro-choice is a useful shorthand which honestly conveys the signal that abortion is up to the choice of the woman, while "pro-life" is a murky and dishonest attempt to act like they're for life when actually they're fine with terrorist movements, wars, people dying from easily preventable diseases, crippling poverty etc. Pro- or anti-choice get to the relevant part in the most honest way possible.

I don't know what "most forms" of contraception are, but all hormonal forms of contraception work by preventing implantation, which is to say, a potentially viable and impregnated egg is expelled post-conception. That's why some southern US states would have outlawed hormonal birth control if their personhood bills went through.
To the best of my knowledge, foetuses do not feel pain at 12 weeks, as their nervous system develops much later. I'm sure you have a good source to say otherwise, though.
"Human life" reveals you don't know enough on the topic to have an informed opinion.
I'm sure you'll take over the pain of bearing the child, the cost of raising it and everything, right? After all, it's not a burden. Oh, and do this for every non-aborted foetus in your country.
And lastly, we get to the Nazi references. Yeah. Though of course Nazis were also anti-choice (Forced abortion for some, outlaw abortions for others), so in reality, you're the one on Team Nazi. If you go with the pro-choice position, there's actually something wrong with forcing people to either abort or not abort against their will.

A quick Google shows me that some research paper noticed fetuses detecting harmful stimuli at 12-ish weeks.

Putting in computer terms: you're setting up the sensors but you haven't hooked them up to the computer yet to actually read its readings or calibrate them properly.

Right. Fair correction.

I'd love to be proven wrong on the pain thing so that's more comforting

So being wrong on the pain thing is a comfort, being on Team Nazi Eugenics has you unperturbed?

[The Free Joy State]

Plus, unlike most forms of contraception you already exist before being aborted. Fetuses feel pain as early as 12 weeks’ gestation. In my opinion that is the point where afterwards having an abortion is unethical, as you are subjecting a human life however small it may be to pain. I disagree with the view that a Fetus is a burden and therefore people should have the right to abort it. It's a slippery slope and similar arguments were used by the Nazis to justify their euthanasia program against the disabled.

I don't know where you heard that nonsense (highlighted by myself). But it is false.

A foetus is insentient until the third trimester (after the legal limit for legal, non-emergency abortions). It feels no pain:

"The science shows that based on gestational age, the fetus is not capable of feeling pain until the third trimester," said Kate Connors, a spokesperson for ACOG. The third trimester begins at about 27 weeks of pregnancy.
[...]
Second, the neurons in the spinal cord that transmit that signal up to the brain must be developed. Researchers who looked at fetal tissues reported that this happens at around 19 weeks, the review said.

Third, the neurons that extend from the spinal cord into the brain need to reach all the way to the area of the brain where pain is perceived. This does not occur until between 23 and 24 weeks, according to the review.

Moreover, the nerves' existence isn't enough to produce the experience of pain, the authors wrote in their review. Rather, "These anatomical structures must also be functional," the authors wrote. It's not until around 30 weeks that there is evidence of brain activity that suggests the fetus is "awake."

And the slippery slope fallacy is just that... a fallacy.

EDIT: Oh, your sources provided to others include the pro-life propaganda righttolife. That explains a lot.

[Attempted Socialism]

No. Pro-choice is a useful shorthand which honestly conveys the signal that abortion is up to the choice of the woman, while "pro-life" is a murky and dishonest attempt to act like they're for life when actually they're fine with terrorist movements, wars, people dying from easily preventable diseases, crippling poverty etc. Pro- or anti-choice get to the relevant part in the most honest way possible.

I don't know what "most forms" of contraception are, but all hormonal forms of contraception work by preventing implantation, which is to say, a potentially viable and impregnated egg is expelled post-conception. That's why some southern US states would have outlawed hormonal birth control if their personhood bills went through.
To the best of my knowledge, foetuses do not feel pain at 12 weeks, as their nervous system develops much later. I'm sure you have a good source to say otherwise, though.
"Human life" reveals you don't know enough on the topic to have an informed opinion.
I'm sure you'll take over the pain of bearing the child, the cost of raising it and everything, right? After all, it's not a burden. Oh, and do this for every non-aborted foetus in your country.
And lastly, we get to the Nazi references. Yeah. Though of course Nazis were also anti-choice (Forced abortion for some, outlaw abortions for others), so in reality, you're the one on Team Nazi. If you go with the pro-choice position, there's actually something wrong with forcing people to either abort or not abort against their will.

Edit: And because I swear I had something for this:

I am writing this in order to outline why we ought to minimise abortions, but also why we ought to allow abortions. I will try to offer a better use of “person” and “personhood”, which will not only be superior because it is philosophically grounded and consistent, but also because it works in other areas such as law or commerce. This last part is also a clarion call to my fellow pro-choice advocates to be careful about their use of certain words.

Terminology, in so many words.
First, however, a few words on words. I use “pro” and “anti-“”choice” rather than “-life” for three reasons. First, it’s fundamentally a question of whether a woman should have a choice. Life is a multitude of things, and being “pro” life is often a vacuous way of saying that women should not have a choice. Policies that give people (Or indeed living things) a better life are separate from any policy on abortions, and both pro- and anti-choice advocates can be for or against these policies independent of their stance on abortion. Being “pro” life is as meaningful as being “pro” good and “anti” bad. “Pro” life is a convenient rebranding of the issue.
Second, though related, I don’t actually believe most of these alleged “pro” life advocates. In other areas than abortion, they often happily advocate death and destruction, whether assault on and murder of doctors, wars in the Middle East, cuts to healthcare- and social services, and many other policies that either directly kills people or makes a decent life harder to accomplish. Furthermore, my anecdotal (But I am pretty sure I’d be able to back it up with statistical evidence if I put in an effort) observation is that almost all anti-choice advocates are also against enlightened ways to incentivise more children, such as child support, free healthcare, free education and the like. I have yet to see an anti-choice advocate in the media who is not also advocating for a return to a patriarchal family and family planning; i.e. most anti-choice advocates are anti-abortion for more or other concerns than life.
Third, “pro-“ or “anti-“ abortion is a nonsensical label. Unless a person is advocating more, or forced, abortions, it is safe to assume that they are anti-abortion in some form or another – a question of means and ethics, rather than ends. They may even be against having abortions themselves, depending on their personal stance on the issue. Some in this thread have proclaimed themselves to be anti-abortion but pro-choice. The question is thus not in any meaningful way whether you want more or fewer abortions, or whether you would contemplate having one yourself, or advice your partner to have one, but rather whether you want your personal preferences to be the legal requirements for everyone else. Abortion is a question of policy for everyone, not what you personally might do.
Regarding the words “human” and “person”, they have almost interchangeable use in common parlance. However, when we are talking about “personhood” and when one becomes a person, compared to being human, the differences are crucial to avoid conflating causes and effects, and overlapping but distinct categories. As such, “human” here is either (a) member(s) of our subspecies, homo sapiens sapiens, or the adjective, something that is of or by members of said specie (“Human DNA”, “human reaction” etc).
“Person” is here a member of the category of beings with the trait of having personhood, as I elaborate later. It is overlapping with most humans, but would also include any hypothetical sapient spacefaring aliens. As I explain subsequent, it is also the state of being where you have legal rights and obligations (In English law terminology AFAIK “natural person”). I use “legal entity” when referring to any entity, such as corporation, collective, state, etc., that also has rights and obligations, but does not have personhood. This is not the normal usage in law where I live (Where “legal person” would be the accurate translation), but it makes it less confusing to be talking about natural versus legal persons.
I try to use specific terms for the stages of human development and legality. “Children”, “baby”, “toddler” etc. are terms that refer to offspring after birth, “zygote”, “embryo”, “foetus” etc. refer to offspring while still in some stage of prenatal development. “Homicide” is when a person kills another person (From Latin, ‘the killing of a human’), but without or before any legal judgement. “Justified homicide” is a legal killing, for instance self-defence, and “manslaughter” is an unintended, accidental, or non-malicious killing, but one where the killer is still punished. “Murder” is an intended, planned or malicious killing of another person with the associated long sentence. While there are several distinctions between various jurisdictions on what constitutes justified homicide, manslaughter and murder, I think my intended meaning comes across.
Lastly, “life” simply uses a common biological definition: Homeostasis, cells, metabolism, grow, adapt, react to external environment and capable of reproduction. This places humans alongside our fellow animals in Kingdom Animalia, and our fellow multi-celled organisms in the Eukaryote Domain, and within the Tree of Life as a whole. While religious groups may want to talk about their divine being(s) and soul(s), I prefer to plant my philosophy and policy preferences on ground as close to objective reality as possible.
With these distinctions out of the way, I can get to the meat of my project.

Why abortions ought to be as few as possible.
Abortions aren’t without consequences. The medical effects of messing with the human body in this way are seldom harsh, but they are there even when mild. Most abortions happen at a time where the procedure can be done with a pill, potentially even in the women’s own home, with limited adverse effects and few risks of side-effects. Late-stage abortions are often comparatively riskier, though in the grand scheme of things, modern medicine has made abortion safe in most instances. Still, there are non-zero risks involved with abortions. This is a point where pro- and anti-choice actually agree, though with different emphasis. Even if we leave aside the oft-overstated risks that the anti-choice advocates offer for restrictions on abortions, we also have to consider the health risks of being pregnant and giving birth.
Without being a doctor, I can hardly give a medical evaluation of the associated risks with either. Going through both my own country’s Ministry of Health websites and the CDC, however, the list of risks involved with abortion is substantially shorter than the combined list of risks with a continued pregnancy and a birth, and any risk with abortion is also included in the list of pregnancy and birth risks. When considering the peer reviewed literature, it seems clear to me that the mortality risks are simply not comparable [1]; the mortality rate for births are roughly 15 times as high as abortion, and that risk is obfuscating a stark difference in abortion risks over time [2].
While abortions are safer than birth, that still leaves abortion as a non-zero risk for the zero gain of reverting to a state of non-pregnancy. We should clearly not invite people to take a risk with their bodies without mitigation. Luckily, contraception is a thing.
While medical complications as area can only be improved through scientific research and improvement, social condemnation is an aspect that we can evaluate and improve separately. This also ties in to mental issues. It is currently a fact that terrorist organisations like Operation Rescue, as well as long-term US social trends, translates to ostracization of women who get abortions. Doctors who perform abortions are literally risking their life as well. The discourse is largely about judging and condemning. While I can’t get solid numbers on social effects, but must infer them from polling, we can quickly see that roughly half of the US population are “pro” life [3], and that while roughly half want to make abortion legal in ‘some circumstances’, for many people that list can be reduced to the classic “rape, incest and life of the mother”. Another 20% want it illegal in all circumstances.
While I in no way suggest that all these respondents are as extreme as, say, Keshiland has been in this thread, this polling and news stories on the subject suggest that for roughly 50-70% of the US population, abortion is a socially condemnable act, even if not legally. This will have a negative impact on the women who choose abortion, regardless of any inherent effect from the abortion itself. Numbers on e.g. post-abortion depressions are statistically not significantly different from post-birth depressions [4] when taking confounding factors into account, but this study does not take social evaluation and culture into account. This means that women who are brought up learning that abortions are evil, who subsequently have abortions, may have worse mental conditions than usual. Social evaluation of abortion can also impact women’s mental health, with any range of negative evaluations of women who have abortions, such as them being ‘slutty’, ‘unable to take care of themselves’, ‘irresponsible’, ‘murderers’ or any other list of adjectives (Just within this thread, there are numerable examples to this effect). These factors are not included in the controls of the linked study (Which I get – both because it’s not the purpose of the study, and because it’s incredibly hard to do well), which means we cannot know to what degree these adverse mental effects from abortions are biological or social in origin.
Regardless of whether mental effects are biological or social, however, they are a large part of the social discourse. Condemnation of abortion as an evil act, and hyping or overselling the medical, mental and social impacts of abortions, have been repeat offenses by the anti-choice advocates, even in this thread.
That does not invalidate the impact, though. A non-zero risk, whether medical, mental or social, is better avoided when the ‘gain’, as here, is reverting to a status quo that could be achieved without taking the risk. In other words, between staying non-pregnant and having an abortion to re-become non-pregnant, staying non-pregnant is preferable. The question on how to achieve that is not the primary subject for this debate, as it’s about family planning and contraception rather than abortion per se, but I would offer two points for consideration:
First, that abstinence-only is an abject failure in every way, shape and form [5], and the proponents of abstinence-only are directly promoting teen pregnancies, teen abortions, social ruination, adverse economic effects and more. Abstinence-only is directly responsible for more abortions, more teen pregnancies and higher STD spread rate.
Second, that while comprehensive sexual education is a right way to go, it is not the only right way to go. Colorado had a huge success with its IUD programme, which lead to a dramatic fall in unintended pregnancies, which in return lead to fewer abortions of said unintended pregnancies [6]. Offering free IUDs to women around the onset of sexual maturity is also economically viable, as the savings offset the health-costs. Furthermore, one has to assess the empowering factor of giving women control over their own reproduction, and the process of family planning that starts already when taking the IUD out, when a woman desire to get pregnant.
To sum up: For women, abortion is associated with fewer health risks than pregnancy and birth. It is comparable to birth in mental health risks, though some as-yet unaccounted-for factors may show abortion to have fewer mental health effects than birth. Social condemnation is substantial and at times dangerous. Meanwhile, to prevent abortions, one has to prevent pregnancies through comprehensive sexual education and free IUDs, while abstinence-only proponents fail at every level.

Concerning Contraception.
Not all anti-choice advocates are in disagreement with the assessment above. Some would claim that they try to empower women to avoid unintended pregnancies exactly because they want specific anti-abortion policies, so fewer or no unintended pregnancies would offset the consequences of illegal abortions. This attempted compromise-argument rests on a particular foundational falsehood: That contraception always works, and that not using contraception is blame-worthy.
Contraception failure is a wonderful example of double-think among some anti-choice advocates. The argument goes that because the number of abortions due to contraception failure is so small, we oughtn’t make abortion legal for all those who do not use contraception, or only uses it infrequently (Because, some reason, they chose not to use contraception, and thus their own carelessness got them into the mess). However, any ‘small amount’ argument would also work on the exceptions due to “rape, incest and life of the mother” that many anti-choice advocates want to allow for (And which I will address in depth later), and it counters the anti-choice advocates who decry the moral failure of late-term abortions. It also follows that if contraception had a much higher failure rate, we ought to legalise abortion for that reason, which runs counter to the argument anti-choice advocates try to make with contraception failure statistics.
Furthermore, unless an anti-choice advocate also wants to make contraception free for all forever, they need to grapple with the fact that access to contraception is not universal, and that many women, especially young or from ethnic minorities, can’t afford contraception entirely on their own [7], leading to women being blamed for not using an option they never had.
By focusing on contraception-use, anti-choice advocates sometimes try to make “sex without contraception” mean “consent to pregnancy”. There is no logical step from A to B here; the argument is a complete non-sequitur.
I would also argue that we should not limit rights by such an arbitrary punishment mentality. This doesn’t happen anywhere else; with rights to free speech, voting, search and seizure etc. Limiting e.g. rights to free speech happens mostly of concerns for other people’s rights, and not because you didn’t care enough to buy a megaphone before attending a rally. Abortion ought to be legal or illegal regardless of contraception and the efficacy thereof.
The most damning argument regarding contraception, however, comes when we consider the way contraception works, more specifically hormonal birth control like the Pill, Patch, IUDs and other. While these may influence how the egg develops and how likely sperm is to reach it, they all prevent implantation in the uterus, meaning that a potentially fertilised egg will fail to implant, and be removed with the next menstruation cycle. If one is of the opinion that “life begins at conception”, or, to put it in legal terms, that embryo have personhood, then each such failed implantation is a dead person, which merits investigation, and each use of the Pill is potentially a homicide (Legal or not). I will get back to the question of personhood and contraception; until then, just be aware that one cannot consider embryo persons if one favours contraception, and anyone arguing for personhood for embryo is implicitly arguing for convicting anyone using the Pill, Patch, IUDs and all other hormonal birth-control of murder.

Handing out memberships.
Thus far I have gone through arguments related to abortion from a viewpoint agnostic to potential rights of the foetus, because apart from the specifics of hormonal contraception and arguments regarding embryonic personhood (A point I will come back to), only the woman is a person. To argue for abortion at any time after conception, however, will quickly get the anti-choice crowd shouting “Think of the [foetus]!”
The word a philosopher would use for the group to which we ought to have ethical consideration and include in our ethical community is ‘personhood’. The term a legal scholar would use for the category of beings who has rights and obligations is also personhood. The vexing question is who are included. So, let us consider who have memberships to the personhood club.
The reason why I develop my criteria for personhood in a somewhat roundabout or abductive way is because there are several competing claims for deserving recipients of our ethical consideration. If we grant memberships one way, it may exclude some categories, and if we do it another, we may be overly inclusive. It is not necessarily the best way to present it in more formal philosophical terms, but I hope that in showing the logic at work, anti-choice proponents’ stances can have the highest possible chance of being included and thus shown why their criteria will lead them astray.
First, we might consider whether it is just human DNA that makes you included, but while this would include all humans, it would also include skin-cells, cancer-cells, corpses and atrophied limbs or organs. Meanwhile, it would exclude a hypothetical intelligent evolved or alien race who live, work, form social communities and become citizens. When we take fictional works set on Earth, say Guide to the Galaxy or Superman, we would not view Ford Prefect or Superman as non-persons, entities upon whom we can place no ethical obligations, from whom we can expect no reciprocal consideration and whom we allow no rights. They are not human, but we would be hard tried to find the criterion by which they ought to be excluded from the club. Clearly, human DNA is not a meaningful metric for inclusion in the personhood club.
Second, what about a whole human? This would solve the issues with individual cells or dead organs, but it would also exclude humans who are not whole, so loss of limb meant loss of personhood, and it would still exclude hypothetical evolved and alien races. Depending on what is meant by “whole”, it may also exclude any children under the age of 13-20. In both considered cases, we see that defining persons by their human biology is excessively restrictive to entities we would recognise as people in any social setting and any work of fiction, that is, people we (may) want to include. It may also be excessively inclusive, to the point where our cut-off hair has the same right as we do.
Do we even need a biological definition of personhood? If we develop an AI so powerful it really becomes conscious and separate from its’ programmers, would we deny it rights and obligations because it is still an electronic machine? Is it ethically justified to turn off the electricity to a conscious machine in a way that we would never allow for the forced starvation of a human? Thus, any subsequent considerations have to allow both non-human and non-biological entities as persons, so long as they are conscious.
What is distinct about being included in the personhood club? Why do we expect something of the beings we include in our ethical consideration and ethical community? I hinted at it before: We expect some measure of reciprocity; that when we ought to consider the concerns of other beings, they too ought to consider ours’. When we include a being in our ethical community, we place them under both the protection of our community, and we expect them to follow the rules in that community. Personhood requires enough self-awareness to see oneself as a part of an ethical community that provides both rights and limitations.
We can then go to a criterion that is on the right path. Sentience, the ability to experience, and especially the ability to suffer. We do explicitly confer some rights to any being we recognise as sentient, through animal cruelty laws, but do we see them as part of our ethical community? Do we need to feel obligated to afford the same rights to all animals as to humans? I would argue not; the ability to feel pain gives us an obligation to protect that being from undue pain, but merely feeling pain is not, in itself, sufficient for personhood.
The capacity for reason is another such option that, while on the right path, doesn’t give us the full picture. If we are literally unable to reason with a being, that being cannot be explained ethical considerations, and is unable to understand the concepts of an ethical community. Like sentience, however, reason alone is not sufficient, as we would lose out on why those rights would matter to a being e.g. unable to feel pain or suffering.
Lastly in our list of criteria, we need a being to be able to communicate in some way, and to be capable of self-induced activities. A being unable to communicate will also be unable to be made aware of other persons in their ethical community, and will be unable to learn of other persons’ concerns, thus be unable to take their plight into ethical consideration. Neither will they be able to express their own concerns, thus make the rest of us able of reciprocating. A being incapable of self-induced activities, whether because it is only capable of other-induced activities or unable to perform activities at all, is either a puppet, a machine or a lump, neither of which are meaningfully entities we might want to include.
Before I go over how this impacts any discussion about the ethics of abortion, I would like to take a last concept under consideration: Whether this is a yes/no or a degree discourse. Can you be more or less self-aware? Can you have more or less capacity for reason? Can you be more or less able to experience pain? Yes, so clearly each element of the admission process can be graded. Should personhood likewise be? Gradient personhood solves some problems: A baby and a toddler are not fully self-aware until between 1 and 2 years of age, and the ability to reason can be under-developed for longer. If each degree is simply better inclusion, more consideration, more voice in our ethical community, we would not have to decide when a baby becomes a person, but we can see that it is a person with fewer obligations and rights than an adult.
Thus, a sensible list of criteria for personhood are the common cognitive criteria of consciousness, reciprocity, self-awareness, sentience, capacity for reason, self-induced activities and ability to communicate, but in a gradient approach. This list is agnostic towards biology or human DNA, so any sufficiently advanced AI, any evolved animal and any alien would also be able to fit into this definition of a person (Some animal activists would argue that great apes already do).

How personhood impacts abortion
With our list, we check if a foetus has the necessary traits. Before a nervous system develops, it is unconscious, unable to reciprocate, not self-aware, not sentient, incapable of reason, has only other-induced activities and is unable to communicate. Until around 20-25 weeks, a foetus has no single necessary trait. After 26 weeks, it has a nervous system and starts some movements, that means sentience some self-induced activities. After 31 weeks, those two traits become more defined, and after 36 weeks, it is technically capable of communication. Thus, the foetus at no point reaches personhood during prenatal development, but our gradient approach means that we ought to have an increasing concern for a foetus as it develops.
Meanwhile, the woman easily fulfils all 7 criteria, meaning that we ought to afford her full ethical consideration and membership in our ethical community.
This approach to personhood also means that in any case where there is scarcity of resources, or where we have to concern ourselves with two different entities, we can evaluate to what degree they are beholden to our ethical considerations. A foetus, being a non-person human, deserves less ethical consideration than a woman, being a person and a human. Without any need to invoke self-defence, we can safely say that the bodily autonomy of a human person trumps a foetus’ non-rights.

Personhood and exceptions
Some anti-choice activists allow for a single line of exceptions: “Rape, incest and life of the mother.” This seems to be from a political analysis that these cases are especially onerous, and it is hard to argue to an electorate that a woman has to bear a child forced upon her by a rapist. However, this quickly runs into an issue, namely that these same advocates also often proclaim life or personhood to start at conception. This means that anti-choice advocates need to square the rights of foetuses based on the method of their conception, rather than any criteria based on rights. For this exception alone, under their definition of personhood, persons can lose their rights based on the acts of their parents, and (Again under their definition of personhood) be legally killed without an investigation, something we do not allow anywhere else.
For any more sensible personhood definition, this is not an issue.

Personhood and contraception
If we decide to grant personhood as I do above, there are no issues with personhood and contraception. However, if we, as I explained before, grant personhood to embryo, then each fertilised embryo that does not become a baby, is a cause for a criminal investigation into the homicide of a person. Any fertile, sexually active woman who takes the pill will need to undergo up to a monthly investigation. The GOP, when championing “personhood-bills” that establish personhood at conception, are well aware of this and the fact that they would effectively outlaw all hormonal contraception, as well as make every miscarriage a subject of a criminal investigation.

Personhood and self-defence
Most jurisdictions have some circumstances where, if you are threatened, you are allowed to defend yourself. Some jurisdictions do allow for lethal force, some do not; some require you to seek out other avenues of disengagement, some do not; some require you do disarm the threat, some do not; some require you to use an appropriate scale of responses, some do not. Common for all self-defence clauses I know of, however, is that self-defence has to be established through an investigation. Some jurisdictions bring homicides to court on principle, some can decide not to bring charges based on justified self-defence, but either way, the self-defender has to face an investigation. Some jurisdictions may not convict for murder, but for assault or manslaughter, if the self-defender can be shown to have used excessive force.
If foetuses are persons, then each abortion and miscarriage is a homicide. Potentially, so are the periods of fertile, sexually active women who are on hormonal contraception. Even if justified self-defence, and thus no sentence, facing a criminal investigation each time will not be pleasant. However, that is the necessary result of giving foetuses personhood.
This is another reason why I invested a lot of time to lay out my arguments: When pro-choice advocates allow foetal personhood because self-defence still is a thing, the consequence is an investigation to determine whether it was justified. I would therefore issue this clarion call to my fellow pro-choice advocates to refine your language and say, for example, that we don’t even allow other persons to infringe on bodily autonomy, so why would we allow a non-person to do so?

Life at conception
Since many anti-choice advocates use “life begins at conception”, I’d just point out that it’s nonsensical. All cells are alive, so the egg and the sperm were alive before conception, and bacteria are alive as well. To say that we ought to protect “life” from “conception” means we have to protect a lot of bacteria, some of which are very harmful to us. It’s either incredibly stupid or momentously meaningless.

Personhood and other laws
Personhood, as I have said before, is already a concept in law. It is how we grant rights and obligations. It is also how we distinguish between, for example, killing a pet in a cruel way (Animal cruelty), killing a pet at a veterinarian (Legal), killing a person in a cruel way (Murder with extenuating circumstances), accidental killing a person (Manslaughter) and so on.
It is also much of the legal debate about euthanasia and persons in a persistent vegetative state. If human DNA, or some other “from conception to death” definition, is our basis for personhood, then turning off life support for a PVS is murder. If the more sensible definition from above is used, that PVS may have lost personhood some time ago, and it no longer can be homicide.

Conclusion
I hope I have shown why a definition that establishes personhood at conception is unworkable, and why you ought to adopt my definition. Furthermore, I hope to have shown why contraception is not a reason to ban abortion, why abortion is safer in medical terms than going through with pregnancy and birth, and why abstinence-only is a failure in every way.


References:
[1] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/22270271
[2] http://journals.lww.com/greenjournal/Ab ... ed.20.aspx
[3] http://news.gallup.com/poll/1576/abortion.aspx
[4] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3929105/
[5] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3194801/
[6] https://www.colorado.gov/pacific/sites/ ... Report.pdf
https://www.colorado.gov/pacific/cdphe/ ... nbirthrate
https://www.nytimes.com/2015/07/06/scie ... ccess.html
[7] https://www.guttmacher.org/report/contr ... 014-update

-----

I have previously posted a short piece [1] on why personhood, i.e. the category of individuals we afford full legal rights, defined gradiently by the common cognitive criteria of consciousness, reciprocity, self-awareness, sentience, capacity for reason and ability to communicate, ought to be the standard on which we adjudicate the question of abortion. I also spent some time going through related subjects, like terminology, healthcare, how to prevent unwanted pregnancies, and how personhood ties in with laws in general. However, looking back on it I failed to properly expand my argument regarding the common legal exceptions to abortion restrictions, which I will attempt to rectify here. I will also reiterate my earlier clarion call for other pro-choice advocates to reconsider any self-defence arguments.
Since I posted my piece on page 417, some 70 pages have been added. While most posters rehash old, often settled, arguments, there are a few posts that I would like to respond to. I recognise that over the many pages following other posters have done so as well, but for my own peace of mind I will respond.

Reconsidering rape, incest and life of the mother
The stated logic from anti-choice advocates with these exceptions is often to avoid punishing women for actions beyond their control. A woman may be a victim of rape or incest, and it would be too onerous to demand that she carries the result of a crime to term; likewise with a pregnancy putting the life of the woman at risk. Women who have sex without protection, or where protection fails, are considered to be responsible for and having consented to the pregnancy – often with some kind of implicit shaming for the perceived promiscuousness or lack of responsibility. Accepting these exceptions will afford legislators some degree of apparent empathy, and possibly protect them from counterclaims about punishing the victims.
However, such exceptions build on foundational considerations of personhood that directly contradict other common anti-choice claims: First and foremost, allowing rape victims access to abortion is conceding a common pro-choice idea, namely that consent is crucial. A woman who did not consent to sex did not consent to becoming pregnant, and ought not be burdened with a rapist’ foetus. Furthermore, it acknowledges that a woman’s consent to sex (Which so far, by the earlier ‘logic’, means consent to pregnancy) matters more than a claim of ‘right to life’ by the foetus.
Insofar that hypothetically consensual incest exists (I.e. that not all incest is also rape, by definition) an exception for incest offers a further point: Aborting in such a case would be to avoid congenital diseases and disorders, in other words that medical reasons also supersede a foetus’ ‘right to life’. It also enables punishing what anti-choice advocates consistently claims to be a person to be punished for the hypothetically consensual acts of their parents; a thoroughly evil concept.
Lastly, ‘life of the mother’ also accepts, explicitly, that when on a balanced scale, weighing one ‘life’ against the life of a woman, the life of a woman, an actual person, weighs the most.
Any anti-choice advocate who accepts these three exceptions implicitly also accept the logic behind two of the major reasons why abortions occur, namely lack of consent to becoming pregnant, and medical reasons for either foetus or woman. This directly undermines the logic of such anti-choice advocates, as their ‘right to life’ is now subject to the woman’s consent and life, and the foetus’ congenital diseases and disorders. A woman withdrawing consent supersedes the ‘right to life’ for any anti-choice advocate who thinks these three exceptions are fair.
Their advocacy is directly antithetical of a logical underpinning to their claimed position.

A few more words on the follies of ‘human’
A lot of anti-choice advocates make a huge fuss about foeti being ‘human’, often adding developmentally and medically nonsense like ‘children’ or ‘babies’. To reiterate from my earlier piece, and common knowledge, ‘human’ is not a reason not to be removed from the body at any other occasion. ‘Human bullet’, ‘human cancer’, ‘human gangrene limb’, ‘human poison’ are most often sought removed regardless of their human production or origin. Even limiting it to ‘human DNA’ would make haircuts, appendicectomies and numerous other medical interventions illegal.
‘Human’ is a word that anti-choice advocates like to throw around. It does not mean what they want it to mean, it does not do what they want it to do, and in any policy or legal sense, it’s absolutely junk.
Without any way of separating a ‘human’ that they wish to protect, such as foeti, and a ‘human’ that they don’t, such as cancer, and still have ‘human’ mean the same thing, they are forced to rely on word-games or just hoping that no one calls them out.

Why pro-choice advocates should reconsider analogies to self-defence
I have been through the basics of this argument before, but it deserves a reemphasis: Even with the most permissive Castle Doctrine laws in the US, cases of self-defence are still investigated as homicides. Legal repercussions may be non-existent due to the nature of self-defence, but the investigation is still a lot to go through for the person subject to them, and it costs a lot of resources for the State to investigate.
Elsewhere in the US and in the world, homicides-as-self-defence may still result in various punishments if the perpetrator was found to have other avenues, such as non-lethal ways to defend themselves.
If we, as pro-choice advocates, cede the question of legal rights because we expect a combination of bodily sovereignty and self-defence to save our case, we have also ceded to the anti-choice advocates the ability to investigate any woman who has an abortion, any woman who has a miscarriage, and potentially any woman on contraception. They would be found innocent, sure, but with the anti-choice creativity for extreme legal cruelty (Such as forced vaginal ultrasound laws, waiting laws and forced written statements), we ought not give a single centimetre unless absolutely necessary.
That is why I would like to reissue my clarion call: If you think personhood or other legal delineations of rights are insignificant because women have rights to self-defence, think about the consequences of a homicide even in self-defence. Then think of an anti-choice cruelty-fetishist like Mike Pence, signatory of Indiana’s forced vaginal ultrasound law, potentially with the power to subject any women to a full police investigation. The anti-choice advocates would have a field day.
While self-defence can be a reasonable argument, we should not cede the debate on rights. If you still want to use such an argument, at least make it clear that you’re not ceding that ground. Something like “We do allow self-defence in (some) cases, against actual persons. Why should we make self-defence illegal against non-persons, effectively giving them more rights?” would do just that.

An absolute view of ‘right to life’
Some posters have tried to make an argument for an absolute right to life [2]. As the post in question starts off with assuming an absolute ‘right to life’, so it also ends up confirming it. The post in question is a finely crafted circular argument, and a few points need to be answered.
As I have said several times, ‘living’ and ‘human’ would include all kinds of cells that we would not afford rights (And, indeed, all modern countries plus many developing countries offer as a right the ability to get rid of), such as cancer. Inherent rights to life is an assumption that I need not grant. The second point jumps straight from ‘inability to consent’ to “society and individuals” has an “inherent responsibility” to protect a foetus’ “right to life on their behalf”. That simply does not follow. The error of making statements from which the conclusion does not follow is repeated in points three through five, just with some added factual errors.
Apart from these errors in establishing a positive justification for their position, there’s also, as first mentioned, the problem of circularly confirming a ‘right to life’ as an absolute. As the poster themselves later affirm, ‘right to life’ cannot be an absolute, as it is superseded in other circumstances by other rights [3].
A ‘right to life’ also has the unfortunate policy implication that organ-harvesting from people who will not die from the procedure can be allowed if it is meant to save other peoples’ lives, whereas sending soldiers off to kill other soldiers is illegal. No sound civilian would accept the former, no sound policymaker would accept the latter.
Investing too much argumentative power in a ‘right to life’ style reason for making abortion illegal has led the anti-choice advocates down a garden path with no productive end in sight.

Abortion compared to other issues
Persons having a right to bodily sovereignty does not just apply to abortions, but also a variety of other issues [4]. By its own, it would decriminalise the use of drugs (But not necessarily possession), as it would make it legal to freely consent to sex (But not necessarily demanding money) or legal to freely consent to giving away organs (But not necessarily demanding money in return). With my proposed approach to personhood, abortion would remain legal up until viability at least, but a woman would have the right to have a foetus removed from her body for longer.

Cause and responsibility
Some posters have been using sloppy arguments based on “cause” and “responsibility” [See 5, among many]. Apart from disregarding intent, quality-of-life and attempts at protection (As well as birth-control, which I go through in my earlier piece [1]), this line of argument also fails to address the notion that causing a problem unwittingly often results in rectifying or removing that problem. If people having sex are responsible for any unwanted pregnancies, then a clear response to that responsibility would be an abortion; rectifying the cause of their problem.
By advocating such a stance, anti-choice advocates ultimately argue for people to abort, rather than their oft-stated policy goal of women carrying to term and putting up for abortion. Otherwise, how can they say they have taken some personal responsibility?

Ireland
And with that being said, congratulations to Ireland for voting for rights to women, even if just for 12 weeks [6].

References
[1] viewtopic.php?f=20&t=415543&p=33188351#p33188351
[2] viewtopic.php?p=33771347#p33771347
[3] viewtopic.php?p=33772471#p33772471
[4] viewtopic.php?f=20&t=415543&p=34002542#p34002542
[5] viewtopic.php?p=34045192#p34045192
[6] http://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-44256152

I believe the state should provide universal childcare and free school meals etc.

You act like this is your redemption. It's not; it's not nothing, but it's not comparable to the cost of raising a child.

I also believe there should be more incentives to adopt, where I live we currently have a shortage of children on the adoption list.

Source, please. You also act like this removes the burden of carrying a child for 9 months. It doesn't.

Saying that the pro life movement is terroristic is a bad faith argument. I and many others totally disavow those who'd use violence to achieve their political aims.

Oh hey, what is this Wiki page? And can I scroll down to find that the US recognises at least one anti-choice group as literally an underground terrorist organisation?

[Molither]

(Warning: May be upsetting to some

https://www.standard.co.uk/hp/front/66- ... 90810.html

66 infants were born alive after NHS terminations in one year. The majority of those 66 babies took over an hour to die.

https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-47066307

Virginia late-term abortion bill labelled 'infanticide'

“If a mother is in labor...the infant would be delivered. The infant would be kept comfortable. The infant would be resuscitated if that’s what the mother and the family desired, and then a discussion would ensue between the physicians & mother - Virginia's Governor

https://righttolife.org.uk/news/former- ... rn-ireland

First, "right to life" is not a source. It's a site for disinformation.
I think you should re-read the BBC article. It does not support your claim; aborting due to health of the mother is still allowed. The 66 babies are non-viable, "major abnormalities", once you strip out the emotion and guesswork.
So in essence, you have no source for your claim. Good to know.

A quick Google shows me that some research paper noticed fetuses detecting harmful stimuli at 12-ish weeks.

Putting in computer terms: you're setting up the sensors but you haven't hooked them up to the computer yet to actually read its readings or calibrate them properly.

Right. Fair correction.

I'd love to be proven wrong on the pain thing so that's more comforting

So being wrong on the pain thing is a comfort, being on Team Nazi Eugenics has you unperturbed?

Being on team Nazi Eugenics?

I oppose Nazism as it's an evil ideology. No one should say they're superior to others based on pre-determined characteristics and use this to persecute.

If anything, although I'm sure the vast majority of Pro Choicers are against eugenics, you shouldn't claim that Pro Lifers are on team eugenics.

Abortion is often used to eliminate the poor and those who would be born different. Poorer folks have higher rates of abortion as well as the less educated. If anything this would be a eugenicists dream.

[Esternial]

I believe the state should provide universal childcare and free school meals etc.

You act like this is your redemption. It's not; it's not nothing, but it's not comparable to the cost of raising a child.

Can we also take a moment to think about the psychological impact on a child being born into the world, forced and most likely unwanted?

Should they ever find out the ramifications could be quite impactful...

[Molither]

I'd love to be proven wrong on the pain thing so that's more comforting

Given the subject there are a lot of bad actors on both sides warping the evidence to push extreme agendas. It's not easy to wade through all that and not be intimidated.

I think the main reason I'm quite skeptical of such claims is because I've studied human embryonology in university, so I feel relatively comfortable with my knowledge on the subject matter.

I will concede that you know more about embryos than me. However (I hate to be the cringeworthy Arts student) abortion is more of a moral question.

[Agarntrop]

It isn't true that abortion is banned after 24 weeks in the US, nor is it true that the majority of legalised on-demand 3rd trimester 'abortions' are sought in only extreme circumstances.

[Attempted Socialism]

First, "right to life" is not a source. It's a site for disinformation.
I think you should re-read the BBC article. It does not support your claim; aborting due to health of the mother is still allowed. The 66 babies are non-viable, "major abnormalities", once you strip out the emotion and guesswork.
So in essence, you have no source for your claim. Good to know.

Right. Fair correction.

So being wrong on the pain thing is a comfort, being on Team Nazi Eugenics has you unperturbed?

Being on team Nazi Eugenics?

I oppose Nazism as it's an evil ideology. No one should say they're superior to others based on pre-determined characteristics and use this to persecute.

If anything, although I'm sure the vast majority of Pro Choicers are against eugenics, you shouldn't claim that Pro Lifers are on team eugenics.

Abortion is often used to eliminate the poor and those who would be born different. Poorer folks have higher rates of abortion as well as the less educated. If anything this would be a eugenicists dream.

You're on the same side in your crusade against a woman's right to choose. There's an overlap here, which is why it's relevant as a rebuttal to your inane slippery slope fallacy against the pro-choice side. I'm just applying your Nazi reference in a fair and balanced manner, that is, I look at the anti-choice policies of the Nazis and the anti-choice policies you espouse and see that you're literally on Team Nazi when it comes to abortion. Now, this is fairly crass to bring up, so I wouldn't do it if it wasn't as a rebuttal, but here we are.
Being on the anti-choice side leaves you with no defence against eugenics; when it's up to the state to decide, it can decide for you to abort or carry to term. The Nazis did so selectively, but there's no real difference from that to what you want.

[Esternial]

Given the subject there are a lot of bad actors on both sides warping the evidence to push extreme agendas. It's not easy to wade through all that and not be intimidated.

I think the main reason I'm quite skeptical of such claims is because I've studied human embryonology in university, so I feel relatively comfortable with my knowledge on the subject matter.

I will concede that you know more about embryos than me. However (I hate to be the cringeworthy Arts student) abortion is more of a moral question.

Indeed, it's a moral question, but it is invariably tied to biological facts - which is why we so often see people warp these facts to support their moral arguments.

Warping the scientific foundations of the abortion debate makes the moral debate a lot more difficult, as we all must have noticed these past few pages - we spent so much time discussing a biological fact of pain reception rather than the moral conundrum.

This happens in all sorts of moral discussions. Making the science vaguer allows you to push through your argument through where only moral discussions would leave the answer in limbo between the two sides.

[The Caleshan Valkyrie]

My goodness this thread done detonated.

Age is irrelevant, doubly so because the consideration past-birth is largely moot.

I'm not talking about past birth, I'm talking about killing a third grader as a necessary aspect of an abortion. If an abortion required a human sacrifice, if it absolutely necessitated taking a thinking, feeling, person with dreams and aspirations and killing them would it in any way change the equation?

One: If it were a third grader it would not be an abortion

Two: My position on abortion is not predicated on dehumanizing the fetus. I specifically hold the two as equivalent, and find that if a born person has no right to use another person’s body without their consent, then neither should a fetus. It is a sad thing, but necessary if we wish to be properly equitable.

[Agarntrop]

Being on team Nazi Eugenics?

I oppose Nazism as it's an evil ideology. No one should say they're superior to others based on pre-determined characteristics and use this to persecute.

If anything, although I'm sure the vast majority of Pro Choicers are against eugenics, you shouldn't claim that Pro Lifers are on team eugenics.

Abortion is often used to eliminate the poor and those who would be born different. Poorer folks have higher rates of abortion as well as the less educated. If anything this would be a eugenicists dream.

You're on the same side in your crusade against a woman's right to choose. There's an overlap here, which is why it's relevant as a rebuttal to your inane slippery slope fallacy against the pro-choice side. I'm just applying your Nazi reference in a fair and balanced manner, that is, I look at the anti-choice policies of the Nazis and the anti-choice policies you espouse and see that you're literally on Team Nazi when it comes to abortion. Now, this is fairly crass to bring up, so I wouldn't do it if it wasn't as a rebuttal, but here we are.
Being on the anti-choice side leaves you with no defence against eugenics; when it's up to the state to decide, it can decide for you to abort or carry to term. The Nazis did so selectively, but there's no real difference from that to what you want.

If you read back, you'd see Molither despite being opposed to abortion wishes to keep the practise legalised.

[Agarntrop]

My goodness this thread done detonated.

I'm not talking about past birth, I'm talking about killing a third grader as a necessary aspect of an abortion. If an abortion required a human sacrifice, if it absolutely necessitated taking a thinking, feeling, person with dreams and aspirations and killing them would it in any way change the equation?

One: If it were a third grader it would not be an abortion

Two: My position on abortion is not predicated on dehumanizing the fetus. I specifically hold the two as equivalent, and find that if a born person has no right to use another person’s body without their consent, then neither should a fetus. It is a sad thing, but necessary if we wish to be properly equitable.

By this logic it would be legal to kill your children if they intruded on your property rights.

[Attempted Socialism]

You're on the same side in your crusade against a woman's right to choose. There's an overlap here, which is why it's relevant as a rebuttal to your inane slippery slope fallacy against the pro-choice side. I'm just applying your Nazi reference in a fair and balanced manner, that is, I look at the anti-choice policies of the Nazis and the anti-choice policies you espouse and see that you're literally on Team Nazi when it comes to abortion. Now, this is fairly crass to bring up, so I wouldn't do it if it wasn't as a rebuttal, but here we are.
Being on the anti-choice side leaves you with no defence against eugenics; when it's up to the state to decide, it can decide for you to abort or carry to term. The Nazis did so selectively, but there's no real difference from that to what you want.

If you read back, you'd see Molither despite being opposed to abortion wishes to keep the practise legalised.

And they're free to stop arguing for anti-choice policies and retract their slippery slope at any point, which would leave me with nothing to challenge.

[Molither]

I will concede that you know more about embryos than me. However (I hate to be the cringeworthy Arts student) abortion is more of a moral question.

Indeed, it's a moral question, but it is invariably tied to biological facts - which is why we so often see people warp these facts to support their moral arguments.

Warping the scientific foundations of the abortion debate makes the moral debate a lot more difficult, as we all must have noticed these past few pages - we spent so much time discussing a biological fact of pain reception rather than the moral conundrum.

This happens in all sorts of moral discussions. Making the science vaguer allows you to push through your argument through where only moral discussions would leave the answer in limbo between the two sides.

I don't want to bring this up again too much but isn't the science not fully settled on fetal pain? It's impossible to ask the fetus and I've heard conflicting accounts today. The current scientific answer to the 12 week pain sensation as you explained is a response to stimuli.

A not so fun fact:

In the late nineteenth, and first half of the twentieth century doctors were taught that babies did not experience pain, and were treating their young patients accordingly. From needle sticks to tonsillectomies to heart operations were done with no anaesthesia or analgesia, other than muscle relaxation for the surgery.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pain_in_babies#

[The Caleshan Valkyrie]

My goodness this thread done detonated.



One: If it were a third grader it would not be an abortion

Two: My position on abortion is not predicated on dehumanizing the fetus. I specifically hold the two as equivalent, and find that if a born person has no right to use another person’s body without their consent, then neither should a fetus. It is a sad thing, but necessary if we wish to be properly equitable.

By this logic it would be legal to kill your children if they intruded on your property rights.

It’s like ‘necessary force’ just becomes this alien and incomprehensible concept for folks in this line of discussion...

[Agarntrop]

By this logic it would be legal to kill your children if they intruded on your property rights.

It’s like ‘necessary force’ just becomes this alien and incomprehensible concept for folks in this line of discussion...

During an abortion the fetus is destroyed.

[Molither]

You're on the same side in your crusade against a woman's right to choose. There's an overlap here, which is why it's relevant as a rebuttal to your inane slippery slope fallacy against the pro-choice side. I'm just applying your Nazi reference in a fair and balanced manner, that is, I look at the anti-choice policies of the Nazis and the anti-choice policies you espouse and see that you're literally on Team Nazi when it comes to abortion. Now, this is fairly crass to bring up, so I wouldn't do it if it wasn't as a rebuttal, but here we are.
Being on the anti-choice side leaves you with no defence against eugenics; when it's up to the state to decide, it can decide for you to abort or carry to term. The Nazis did so selectively, but there's no real difference from that to what you want.

If you read back, you'd see Molither despite being opposed to abortion wishes to keep the practise legalised.

It's a difficult position for me to articulate but yes that's essentially it.

Although I believe that Abortion is immoral I don't think it should be made illegal as it in all likelihood would just increase the number of unsafe abortions.

My ideal society would be one without need for abortion, but failing that I view it in a similar way as adultery - morally wrong but should remain legal.

[Esalia]

It’s like ‘necessary force’ just becomes this alien and incomprehensible concept for folks in this line of discussion...

During an abortion the fetus is destroyed.

Yes.

And during the removal of people from your property, they do not need to be destroyed, unlike abortion.

[Agarntrop]

If you read back, you'd see Molither despite being opposed to abortion wishes to keep the practise legalised.

It's a difficult position for me to articulate but yes that's essentially it.

Although I believe that Abortion is immoral I don't think it should be made illegal as it in all likelihood would just increase the number of unsafe abortions.

My ideal society would be one without need for abortion, but failing that I view it in a similar way as adultery - morally wrong but should remain legal.

This is also my position.

Abortion isn't a good thing, but criminalising it is bad for society as abortions will become unsafe and women will die, along with their foetuses.

[Agarntrop]

During an abortion the fetus is destroyed.

Yes.

And during the removal of people from your property, they do not need to be destroyed, unlike abortion.

So by this logic child abandonment should be legal?

Honestly there are way better arguments to justify abortion than this.

[Cultural Posadism]

It's a difficult position for me to articulate but yes that's essentially it.

Although I believe that Abortion is immoral I don't think it should be made illegal as it in all likelihood would just increase the number of unsafe abortions.

My ideal society would be one without need for abortion, but failing that I view it in a similar way as adultery - morally wrong but should remain legal.

This is also my position.

Abortion isn't a good thing, but criminalising it is bad for society as abortions will become unsafe and women will die, along with their foetuses.

The only good pro-life take, imho.

[Agarntrop]

This is also my position.

Abortion isn't a good thing, but criminalising it is bad for society as abortions will become unsafe and women will die, along with their foetuses.

The only good pro-life take, imho.

I guess I am pro life in the sense that I don't think abortion is good, but I don't think many people think it is, even pro-choicers.

It's no better than other tragic medical surgeries e.g. amputations.