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 Da Boss wrote:
It wasn't part of her body, it was a separate organism currently depending on her for nutrition and protection while it grew.

Using phrases like "a cluster of cells" obscures the truth, since we're all, when you get down to it, clusters of cells.

Some of are so old, we're just one cell with lots of waivy appendages....

 Da Boss wrote:
Well, one could make the same argument about a newborn child up to the point where it can fend for itself, or a person who requires care to survive- a very ill person, a paralysed person, a person on any kind of life support.

In my view, at least.

Also, significantly from a biological perspective- the embryo has an unique genetic code.

I don't think that has any ethical significance. We recognise identical twins as two separate people despite their identical genes.

 gossipmeng wrote:
Well lets see, the woman is fine - there is no permanent damage. The guy doesn't want this kid, so that would be just another child from a struggling home. I'm sorry if I don't feel sympathy for women who don't wait for a steady boyfriend/husband before attempting to have a child. Should he have slipped her the pill? No. Am I personally offended by this case? Not at all. Could this all have been avoided if both people involved actually gave a damn about a potential preganancy? Certainly.

It burns down to what your belief is: is it a baby or is it just some useless grouping of cells with the potential to become a baby in the next few months?

I've seen women loss pregnancies, either due to medical miscarriage or voluntary (legal) abortion. I won't say there's no harm. Losing a baby is often incredibly traumatic.

 Polonius wrote:

 gossipmeng wrote:
Well lets see, the woman is fine - there is no permanent damage. The guy doesn't want this kid, so that would be just another child from a struggling home. I'm sorry if I don't feel sympathy for women who don't wait for a steady boyfriend/husband before attempting to have a child. Should he have slipped her the pill? No. Am I personally offended by this case? Not at all. Could this all have been avoided if both people involved actually gave a damn about a potential preganancy? Certainly.

It burns down to what your belief is: is it a baby or is it just some useless grouping of cells with the potential to become a baby in the next few months?

I've seen women loss pregnancies, either due to medical miscarriage or voluntary (legal) abortion. I won't say there's no harm. Losing a baby is often incredibly traumatic.

In that case lets refer back to the details of this particular case - messing around with some random dude and expecting things to go smoothly? Either way you have a broken home or an aborted fetus.

 gossipmeng wrote:

 Polonius wrote:

 gossipmeng wrote:
Well lets see, the woman is fine - there is no permanent damage. The guy doesn't want this kid, so that would be just another child from a struggling home. I'm sorry if I don't feel sympathy for women who don't wait for a steady boyfriend/husband before attempting to have a child. Should he have slipped her the pill? No. Am I personally offended by this case? Not at all. Could this all have been avoided if both people involved actually gave a damn about a potential preganancy? Certainly.

It burns down to what your belief is: is it a baby or is it just some useless grouping of cells with the potential to become a baby in the next few months?

I've seen women loss pregnancies, either due to medical miscarriage or voluntary (legal) abortion. I won't say there's no harm. Losing a baby is often incredibly traumatic.

In that case lets refer back to the details of this particular case - messing around with some random dude and expecting things to go smoothly? Either way you have a broken home or an aborted fetus.

I don't see how the woman's actions have any relevance on the moral and legal integrity of her person.

You're well into dangerous "she was asking for it" territory.

It looks like an advanced form of victim blaming.

It was the woman's fault for having an affair with a man who had another girlfriend.

 gossipmeng wrote:

 Polonius wrote:

I've seen women loss pregnancies, either due to medical miscarriage or voluntary (legal) abortion. I won't say there's no harm. Losing a baby is often incredibly traumatic.

In that case lets refer back to the details of this particular case - messing around with some random dude and expecting things to go smoothly? Either way you have a broken home or an aborted fetus.

I wonder if it is possible to raise a well-adjusted child in a non-nuclear household.


Automatically Appended Next Post:

 Polonius wrote:

I don't see how the woman's actions have any relevance on the moral and legal integrity of her person.

You're well into dangerous "she was asking for it" territory.

More horrifyingly, he seems to be saying that the moral and legal integrity of her person justifies what the donkey-cave in the article did to her.

 Kilkrazy wrote:
It looks like an advanced form of victim blaming.

It was the woman's fault for having an affair with a man who had another girlfriend.

She shouldn't have worn that slutty dress... (and so on)

 Kilkrazy wrote:

 Da Boss wrote:
Well, one could make the same argument about a newborn child up to the point where it can fend for itself, or a person who requires care to survive- a very ill person, a paralysed person, a person on any kind of life support.

In my view, at least.

Also, significantly from a biological perspective- the embryo has an unique genetic code.

I don't think that has any ethical significance. We recognise identical twins as two separate people despite their identical genes.

It has significance in determining that the fetus is not part of the mother's body, which is an incorrect argument put forward by pro choice advocates to disguise the fact that abortion is the killing of an individual.

I am pro choice, by the way. I just find that line of argument dishonest.

It's the internet I'm not here to make friend (or else I'd be "oh-em-jee! jail him a bajillion years - it was a baby! His name was Sean and his funural is next week -> Queue vigil of 10,000).

We have these articles posted on Dakka and some of them are just rehashing the same arguments. We all put on our moraility hats and pull out our crosses from under our shirts.

I'm just putting an extreme viewpoint out there to see what happens. It's supposed to be outrageous - aren't Canadians fun?

 gossipmeng wrote:
It's the internet I'm not here to make friend (or else I'd be "oh-em-jee! jail him a bajillion years - it was a baby! His name was Sean and his funural is next week -> Queue vigil of 10,000).

We have these articles posted on Dakka and some of them are just rehashing the same arguments. We all put on our moraility hats and pull out our crosses from under our shirts.

I'm just putting an extreme viewpoint out there to see what happens. It's supposed to be outrageous - aren't Canadians fun?

That's adorable. Now go play outside while the adults are talking.

I know this might be hard for some, but lets ignore the rights of the fetus for now. Everything else he did was illegal and he should be punished for each thing he did. Lets leave the abortion out of it, since that is such a touchy subject.

 timetowaste85 wrote:
I know this might be hard for some, but lets ignore the rights of the fetus for now. Everything else he did was illegal and he should be punished for each thing he did. Lets leave the abortion out of it, since that is such a touchy subject.

I agree with this ^^

 timetowaste85 wrote:
I know this might be hard for some, but lets ignore the rights of the fetus for now. Everything else he did was illegal and he should be punished for each thing he did. Lets leave the abortion out of it, since that is such a touchy subject.

Agreed...

What if he slipped some roofies in her drinks to take advantage of her?

Sorta the same situation, eh?

 whembly wrote:

 timetowaste85 wrote:
I know this might be hard for some, but lets ignore the rights of the fetus for now. Everything else he did was illegal and he should be punished for each thing he did. Lets leave the abortion out of it, since that is such a touchy subject.

Agreed...

What if he slipped some roofies in her drinks to take advantage of her?

Sorta the same situation, eh?

I had been thinking something similar, that rape might be a better model for forceful termination of pregnancy then murder.

Either way, 12 years for rape isn't unheard of.

 Seaward wrote:
It would seem to take a great deal of cognitive dissonance to suggest that one case meets the definition of homicide - the killing of a human by a human - and the other does not. Unless it's Schrodinger's fetus, both a human and not a human at the same time.

Not both at once, but is if the mother wants it to be, and is not if the mother does not.

Really, really not that big a concept to wrap your head around. You might not like it as a concept, and that's fair enough, but to act bewildered by it is putting on a show.

 Seaward wrote:
Oh, I know. I was responding to sebster's assertion that what the guy did amounts to premeditated murder. It clearly doesn't, if you're pro-choice, and clearly does, if you're pro-life. You can't really have it both ways.

Of course you can. You can say 'if the mother wants to bring the fetus to term, it is all for all intents and purposes a human life, but if the mother does not want that then it isn't'.

This is, once again, gak that ain't that hard to understand. You don't have to agree with it, but pretending you don't understand it or it doesn't exist is boring.


Automatically Appended Next Post:

 Seaward wrote:
Aren't both the mother and father equally responsible for offspring? That seems to be the rationale for requiring men to pay child support when they would have wanted the mother to abort the fetus.

Responsible for the child, yes. Before birth, however, it is only the woman who carries the child. You might have learnt that from primary school biology or by having children of your own, that the father's role is basically limited to acting sympathetic.

This is why, you know, you get the mother determining if she wants to actually have the baby or not.

I am late to this discussion, but could it be that the judge agrees with the pro-life movement? that way a fetus is alive and the guy committed murder.

 Polonius wrote:

I had been thinking something similar, that rape might be a better model for forceful termination of pregnancy then murder.
Either way, 12 years for rape isn't unheard of.

I suppose after some point in time (7-8 months, when it's viable), you could switch over to a murder based model as opposed to a rape based model. And I'm assuming we're talking willful and malicious termination, not the BF accidentally giving her cough medicine that was too strong and her having an unanticipated reaction.

Well, I can only talk about Austrian (and, to a lesser extent, German and Swiss) legislation, but the way it's handled here always struck me as rather efficient:

We have a seperate offence that's called "abortion", which is basically a form of privileged homicide. If done within the first three months of the pregnancy by a doctor, or at any point of the pregnancy out of serious health concerns for the mother, or if the female is a minor (here: 14 years), it can not be prosecuted. In all other cases, the normal scope of sentencing for this particular offence applies equally to the pregnant female and second parties.

The fetus' protection as a person (e.g. the point at which intentionally killing it becomes "murder") begins with the onset of labor.

There really is no need for complicated constructions when you simply treat it seperately in the criminal code.

He should've got a short sentence or a fine for forcing her to take something she didn't want, but I would really like to see where the logic behind calling it murder is. The Bacteria in your stomach are more complex organisms than a freshly fertilized embryo.

I think comparing the complexity of the embryo to anything else will lead you nowhere. It was six weeks into development, and if you have more complex bacteria than THAT in your stomach, I would see a doctor ASAP.

Abortion isn't treated as murder by the law.

Right-wing Christian groups in the USA, or "Pro-Life" as they term themselves, have annexed the term of murder in order to provide more emotional impact to their message.

Abortion in most countries, such as Austria as described above, the UK, and USA, is treated as the crime of Abortion, with various medico-legal exceptions. An important one of which is if the mother wants the abortion.

In these rare cases in which someone else causes an unwanted abortion by stealth or force, it can be dealt with by the existing legal framework that supports prosecutions for assault, poisoning, abortion, misuse of prescription drugs, and, in the USA, Unborn Child Defence Act.

There is no need for additional law.

 Allod wrote:
I think comparing the complexity of the embryo to anything else will lead you nowhere. It was six weeks into development, and if you have more complex bacteria than THAT in your stomach, I would see a doctor ASAP.

I didn't read six weeks, actually. I thought it was a couple days. Never mind. There's a possibility I have a tapeworm, which is more complex than an Embryo, probably.

Even if it was a couple of days (and I can't believe I'm even engaging in this ridiculous argument), even if it was PRE FERTILIZATION, any human cell, a zygote, a gamete, a skin cell, is far more complex in structure than any bacterium.

At a cellular level, there is piles of incredibly complex stuff going on in a developing zygote, including functionality that an adult cell cannot match. (Totipotency, for one)

But there again, it's a dumb line of argument. Plant cells are "more complex" than animal cells, are they entitled to more rights based on this? Are people who have genetic conditions resulting in an overall loss of complexity less human that those who have greater complexity?

I think the biology of the foetus should be divorced from pro choice arguments because the basis for it is always such a crock of indefensible bs. Trying to win the argument with "science" doesn't work because science has absolutely nothing to say about what a "person" is, when someone "counts as a human" and all of these other things. Both sides try to sway undecideds with information about exactly how developed a foetus is, but it's kind of irrelevant.

Are you okay with killing humans that nobody in the world has met, nobody in the world wants to survive? That is the question. I think in reality most of us are, because even pro-life people don't actually try to intervene in all these "murders". Both sides are a bit deluded about what that means, though.

(Of course, I, Da Boss, am completely right, and therefore glowing in my own smugness. You may lick my feet, if you must )

I think the biology of the foetus should be divorced from pro choice arguments because the basis for it is always such a crock of indefensible bs. Trying to win the argument with "science" doesn't work because science has absolutely nothing to say about what a "person" is, when someone "counts as a human" and all of these other things. Both sides try to sway undecideds with information about exactly how developed a foetus is, but it's kind of irrelevant.

Comparing complexity of cells might be a little silly, but science is the only thing that actually gives us information on how the fetus develops in real time.

If we ignore science, we have to turn to philosophy and religion, and then we're relying on some vague definition of the "soul" and when that enters the body.

Being able to pinpoint the average length of time it takes for a fetus to become viable is important, in my opinion. That's where I consider it "alive" as a person. Prior to that point, fetuses have more in common with a tape worm than a person, in the way they interact with their world/mother/host.

Ah, nah. I don't buy that. That's an emotive argument as well- "it's got more in common with a tapeworm", nah, it doesn't. Tapeworm biology is pretty radically different to a foetus.

It's not science, so much as observation, that tells us about the development of the foetus. Your line in the sand is vague and arbitrary, because the point at which a foetus is "viable outside the womb" is blurry itself, and will move back as technology improves. It may eventually be possible for a foetus to be grown artificially (though we're a long ways off).

That is why I think philosophy, and perhaps religion if that's your thing, are better frameworks to examine this than science. Science does not try to tell us what we "should" do in any situation, and it's not meant for dealing with complex ethical issues.

The more I discuss this issue the more apparent how intensely politicised it is, to the point where I can't even agree with my own "side".

 DogofWar1 wrote:

I think the biology of the foetus should be divorced from pro choice arguments because the basis for it is always such a crock of indefensible bs. Trying to win the argument with "science" doesn't work because science has absolutely nothing to say about what a "person" is, when someone "counts as a human" and all of these other things. Both sides try to sway undecideds with information about exactly how developed a foetus is, but it's kind of irrelevant.

Comparing complexity of cells might be a little silly, but science is the only thing that actually gives us information on how the fetus develops in real time.

If we ignore science, we have to turn to philosophy and religion, and then we're relying on some vague definition of the "soul" and when that enters the body.

Being able to pinpoint the average length of time it takes for a fetus to become viable is important, in my opinion. That's where I consider it "alive" as a person. Prior to that point, fetuses have more in common with a tape worm than a person, in the way they interact with their world/mother/host.

Then you need to educate yourself. Viability is a moving concept. As technology advances, so does that.

 Frazzled wrote:


Then you need to educate yourself. Viability is a moving concept. As technology advances, so does that.

When did I saw viability wasn't a moving concept? I said science can help us determine viability, and that the point of viability was important.

Science is also what causes viability to move about in the first place, and my point was that you can't divorce science from the abortion debate because scientific discoveries concerning fetuses are the main hard facts we have concerning biological development.

Without that it's all philosophy and religion, neither of which is ground in enough fact to influence the whole discussion (merely parts of it).

 DogofWar1 wrote:

 Frazzled wrote:


Then you need to educate yourself. Viability is a moving concept. As technology advances, so does that.

When did I saw viability wasn't a moving concept? I said science can help us determine viability, and that the point of viability was important.

Science is also what causes viability to move about in the first place, and my point was that you can't divorce science from the abortion debate because scientific discoveries concerning fetuses are the main hard facts we have concerning biological development.

Without that it's all philosophy and religion, neither of which is ground in enough fact to influence the whole discussion (merely parts of it).

You noted that before viability fetuses were akin to tube worms. Your statement makes absolutely no sense, given the above. Are they moving from not being tube worms more quickly because Dr. Strangelove is making a better test tube? How does your scheme fit when viability occurs at the point of fertilization? Has humanity evolved that quickly.

 Frazzled wrote:

 DogofWar1 wrote:

 Frazzled wrote:


Then you need to educate yourself. Viability is a moving concept. As technology advances, so does that.

When did I saw viability wasn't a moving concept? I said science can help us determine viability, and that the point of viability was important.

Science is also what causes viability to move about in the first place, and my point was that you can't divorce science from the abortion debate because scientific discoveries concerning fetuses are the main hard facts we have concerning biological development.

Without that it's all philosophy and religion, neither of which is ground in enough fact to influence the whole discussion (merely parts of it).

You noted that before viability fetuses were akin to tube worms. Your statement makes absolutely no sense, given the above. Are they moving from not being tube worms more quickly because Dr. Strangelove is making a better test tube? How does your scheme fit when viability occurs at the point of fertilization? Has humanity evolved that quickly.

Are you suggesting that technology has advanced to the point that fetuses are viable at the moment of conception? Because they're not, not yet. Even if technology allowed for vat-grown humans like in sci-fi, you still need certain organs to be functioning for the human to function outside of that developmental environment.

I don't really understand what you're trying to argue, because I'm not saying anything not grounded in reality. Prior to a fetus being able to survive outside of the womb/some sort of sci-fi developmental environment, it cannot even function on its own without drawing on outside assistance from the mother. In that way, the relationship prior to viability is a parasitic one, the baby draws on resources of the mother in order to sustain itself. Simple fact.

Post viability, the baby is still growing, BUT it could survive in the world with a relatively minimal amount of unusual assistance. That's an important line, because it's a difference in how that being exists and interacts with the world around it. There is a big difference between a fetus with working lungs that can breath on its own, and a fetus that does not yet have working lungs and either can't breath at all or needs its breathing supplemented by a machine.

If we somehow many fetuses viable at the point of conception then fine, but I don't really see how a zygote could survive outside of the womb.