www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov
Arguing over words rather than the substance of the issue is missing the point.
Firstly, let's get the facts straight:
Fetal Pain
Facts are important, especially when it comes to policies and discussions that impact patients. Here are the scientific facts concerning gestational development and capacity for pain.www.acog.org
"The science conclusively establishes that a human fetus does not have the capacity to experience pain until after at least 24–25 weeks. Every major medical organization that has examined this issue and peer-reviewed studies on the matter have consistently reached the conclusion that abortion before this point does not result in the perception of pain in a fetus".
I don't know why you think otherwise, but if you are basing your objection to abortion on the sensation of pain, then you are looking at 20 weeks plus, the same as me
I agree totally with the sentiment, though obviously I disagree on the substance.
Agreed, science should inform our decisions. For example, I perceive little to no ethical problems in terminating a one day old embryo. It becomes problematic the further along in development it undergoes. Pain and/or sensation would be good criteria as any IMO for determining a cutoff point if protecting human life is a value of western society. The most basic element of human existence is to sense and feel pain.
If you defend the choice of irresponsible and feckless parents to terminate their unborn child’s life then you enable for an innocent child to lose his/her life.
I am defending the rights of the non-feckless and the responsible whose rights would be taken away by lumping them in with the feckless. Meanwhile , I am keen to mitigate against fecklessness and irresponsibility by effective sex and relationship education and provision of health care for the vulnerable.
No, I disagree with this completely. There's no universal agreement on right and wrong, and those who disagree with your position don't do so because they are deceived, but because they have a different opinion from you. It is acty rather arrogant to claim that everyone who has a different opinion is deceiving themselves for ulterior motives. Those people who claim the moral high ground on abortion, are wrong, whichever side they are on. There is no right or wrong when it comes to abortion, just a personal judgement on what does the least harm.
You allow for all irresponsible people to kill their unborn child so that the responsible people can kill theirs.
Of course you do.
To deny any absolute good or bad is the final step towards justifying anything. It is absurd to claim that right and wrong are mere relative values. I think greater of human potential to apply reason, evidence, and ethics, to determining good from bad, when not influenced by lust for pleasure, greed, or power. Humans stumble when they allow themselves to be blinded by such things.
Innocence implies the capacity for guilt. The foetus is no more innocent than a rock. Children, that is born, human and alive children, have rights. The unborn, whether you chose to call them a child or a foetus, had no rights. This in my view is how it should be. No innocent children are killed by abortion. It is the foetus that is killed, which has the potential to become an innocent child in time, but crucially is not one at the point of abortion. Squirrels eat acorns, not oak trees.
You are entitled to your opinion, but that's all it is. Right and Wrong are emergent properties of the brain, specifically from our sense of conscience, which we all possess because of the evolutionary benefits it gives a social species such as ours. Everyone's sense of right and wrong is different. There's no evidence at all of an absolute standard. Where would it come from, and crucially, who decides what it is?
Then according to your erroneous logic we should be allowed to terminate a baby at any time before it has the capacity for guilt because I am pretty sure the act of birth confers no capacity for guilt.
There are no rights without responsibility. How about the right to produce a child comes with responsibility? You would have it that there are only rights and no responsibilities.
You have made an arbitrary line not based on reason or evidence because everyone knows that there is no difference between a one day old human baby and a -1 (minus one day old, or 40-week gestational old) baby.
By your analogy it is ok to kill the unborn because it is smaller than a fully grown human. What a coward position to hold! The opposite should hold true, ie., the weakest among us deserve to be defended, let the strong defend themselves.
Irrelevant
Your opinion is based on the atheistic ideology which presumes no objective good or bad in the world in order to maintain its ideology. There is a reason that atheism logically leads to nihilism and in this case, your justification for killing the unborn baby.
We allow for this specifically with the age of criminal responsibility. A born child has, ad you say, both rights and responsibilities, which are amended and adapted as the child ages. Not so the foetus, which has neither rights nor responsibility.
The responsibilities of the adult do not imply rights for the unborn.
It's not my arbitrary line but the laws, which is drawn because the law cannot function without arbitrary lines. We have discussed why the line is drawn there already. I have also stated that this, in my opinion, is not where the line should be drawn for abortion, because for me the cut off should not be when the child is born, but when they are capable of being born and surviving.
Nonsense. Squirrels don't eat saplings either. It is not the size that counts, it's the state of being. The weakest of us does deserve to be defended, but you are making the assumption about what "us" consists of and whether the foetus is included. Granted we were all once an unborn child in the womb, but that doesn't mean that what applies to us now, should have applied to us then.
Your opinion is based on a superstitious religious belief, which has no place in the determination of public policy, which applies to all, not just to believers. All atheism implies is that there's no God. If you are claiming that Good and Bad are the constructs of a god, then which god? Whose right or wrong should we follow? What makes your God the arbiter, when millions of people have lived and died without knowing of His existence. Did they have no Right or Wrong?
Your opinion is based on you choosing a criteria of human life to suggest a human being can be killed for sexual convenience.
"Upon taking its first breath, the fluid in the newborn lungs is replaced with air, and oxygen diffuses into the blood vessels surrounding the alveoli. Relaxation of the pulmonary arteries occurs, which allows the pulmonary resistance to fall and blood to flow into the lungs."
Breathing takes places in utero. That much is certain. Granted it's in the medium of amniotic fluid, but the lungs do fill and discharge this fluid in utero.
Irrelevant, whilst the purpose of the lungs is to obtain oxygen, one can nonetheless say breathing takes place in utero. You lose again