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When does a person become a person?

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Comments

  • #52
    nozzferrahhtoo
    Registered Users Posts: 9,348 ✭✭✭nozzferrahhtoo


    Frohes Neues as they say over here. Was away on business, conferences, and personal. But back in action now.

    I think above we just need to equivocate over "attack" in the sense of some level of threshold. Someone in your vicinity merely driving a car is a "threat" to your safety by the standards you describe above. Which simply makes me feel that said standard is a bit lax, dilute and labile. I would, at very minimum, expect the "attack" to need to be over and above the minimum caused by mere existence.

    But I do not think that "such attack/threat is sufficient reason for you to legitimise abortion" at all. I think when the fetus has no sentience at all, then there is nothing TO legitimize. Rather if the attack/threat occurs when the fetus is sentient, then it could on a case by case basis warrant overriding the rights sentience brings.


  • #53
    drkpower
    Registered Users, Registered Users 2 Posts: 5,475 ✭✭✭drkpower


    The foetus presents a whole host of complications to the mother, from the mild to the fatal. They can arise insidiously, and without warning. It is well accepted that the risks of pregnancy outweigh the risks of a termination. These are all well documented.

    Whether 'attacks', 'risks' (or choose your won words), are they not sufficient to legitimise/justify abortion regardless of the sentience of the foetus?


  • #54
    Peregrinus
    Registered Users, Registered Users 2 Posts: 26,703 ✭✭✭✭Peregrinus


    drkpower wrote: »
    The foetus presents a whole host of complications to the mother, from the mild to the fatal. They can arise insidiously, and without warning. It is well accepted that the risks of pregnancy outweigh the risks of a termination. These are all well documented.

    Whether 'attacks', 'risks' (or choose your won words), are they not sufficient to legitimise/justify abortion regardless of the sentience of the foetus?
    To be honest, no, I don't, except in cases in which the abortion is actually substantially motivated by a concern over the medical risks associated with pregnancy.

    The medical risks of pregnancy, after all, are something which a majority of women will choose to face at some point, and many will choose to face more than once. And, in the decision of most women about whether and when to have a child, the medical risks of pregnancy are a very marginal factor in the calculation, if a factor at all. And I suggest that's also true in 95% of the cases in which a woman who finds herself pregnant when she hadn't planned to be takes a decision about having an abortion.

    Given this, the suggestion that the medical risks of pregnancy justify an abortion which is actually motivated by entirely different considerations (as the great bulk of abortions in our society are) looks to me like a rationalisation, and not a very convincing one.

    And, worse, I think it's harmful. To tell women that they have to justify their decision to abort by reference to health risks when their motivation for aborting is nearly always something else entirely is to signal that their true motivation is not good enough; is shameful; must not be discussed; must be concealed. And this doesn't encourage the development of a healthy or supportive environment for women facing crisis pregnancies.


  • #55
    nozzferrahhtoo
    Registered Users Posts: 9,348 ✭✭✭nozzferrahhtoo


    drkpower wrote: »
    The foetus presents a whole host of complications to the mother, from the mild to the fatal. They can arise insidiously, and without warning. It is well accepted that the risks of pregnancy outweigh the risks of a termination. These are all well documented.

    Whether 'attacks', 'risks' (or choose your won words), are they not sufficient to legitimise/justify abortion regardless of the sentience of the foetus?

    As I said, I would expect any discourse equivocating over a threshold of risk and attack to include in it a cognizance of the minimum level of STANDARD risk being pregnant involves.

    Otherwise we would be living in a world of "self defense" where just about everything is a risk and an attack. My merely walking past you in the street constitutes a risk as I could hurt you, infect you, have a mental episode and kill you, trip and fall on you and kill you. But I trust you do not feel my merely passing you by in the street, despite the risks, constitutes an appeal for acting in self defense.

    There is a minimum inherent level of risk in EVERYTHING. A conversation on self defense that does not include a base threshold over which it is warranted, is not a conversation that will offer much sensible.


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