Is "killing" a fetus and murdering someone the same?

This debate is about morality, it's not about abortion solving a problem on grand scale it's about the act of abortion here and now. ofcourse prevention is on a gran scale better but the question is not of that nature. Lets dumb it down and make the question "A women wants an abortion and you are the one to decide wether she gets it or not (nothing else, just this 1 women and you are randomly chosen to decide for this one person. You are not changing anything on grand scale) What do you decide and why?

I sincerely wish I am never burdened with such a task... I don't think i'd come out of it the same man, honestly. I've been given the pleasure of not having to decide it. Who knows? I could go hypocritical at the last moment and decide that the life would be spared. I'd rather not have to deal with that sort of task.

I'd have to refer to my post above. If she's post high-school, then by all means she should be made to have the child... But anything before and I honestly believe she's not ready for it. Not emotionally, not physically, and not psychologically.

On another note.

Morality is defined by society in accordance to what harms society, rather than it just being "good or evil", which are both nonexistent and are merely defined once again by what society derives as the norm.

Indeed, a penniless thief who wants to support his dying mother is "Good" in the eyes of people due to the sympathetic notion that he's doing it for his mother. On the other hand, the way he's doing it is "Evil" because in stealing he must harm another individuals welfare. See what I mean?

Morality is so fickle with it's way of defining whats right and wrong that it's very confusing to sit and take the time.

Why? Because there are different clauses depending on situations, like the one described above. Something "Wrong" sometimes must be done in order to do something that is "right"

Conversely, something "right" could lead to something entirely "wrong" in the same sense.

Not to repeat myself, but as I said it's extremely confusing to debate about morality when so many people each have their own individual meaning to it.

Morality is nothing more than an oxymoron.

Things are never as simple as that. Not everyone matures at the same time, nor do some people ever mature. There are women out there who murder their own children because they are imbalanced due to having children.

But on that note, there are far too many things to be considered beyond is the mother healthy enough to have a child. Location is key, a good community raises a good child. Are their supportive grandparents, is the father around to support, can they afford rent, can they afford food, can they afford child toys, can they afford diapers, can they afford transporation, can they afford medical bills, can they afford misc expenses, do both parents work, can one or both combined income support this family, is there proper education, will the child need to move, will the childs parents divorce, will the childs parents possibly die, what are the quality of other children in the area, what are the global economics, what are the local economics, what are the political views, is there criminal activity in the area.

This list can go on and on. There are literally billions of factors to relate in this, people underestimate the impact of the smallest things on thier lives, and live to regret it when it does happen. Hillary Clinton has an amazing quote where she once said "It takes a village to raise a child." This is a perfect description of what it means to take care of a child. Every person they meet in their lives will have an impact, great or small.

There are people out there who's parents gave them all the potential in the world, they let them do as they like, paid for everything, and these kids are now drug addicts and losers.

You can't even look at kids these days without wanting to vomit.

[color=#2e1a6b]I think abortions should be illegal sometime after the mother has time to realize she's pregnant and get an abortion, but before fetal viability.


[color=#2e1a6b]The contradictions come from pro-choice too. If the mother doesn't want the baby, then the baby is not a person and can be terminated. But if the mother does want to have the baby, then the fetus has all the legal protections of a person, and terminating it is murder.

Perhaps, but those contradictions depend of the mother's perspective. The contradictions of people who are against abortion are funny, at least to me, because they see abortion and murder as the same when they feel like it and then change according to the situation. Here's an example:

Abortion is murder so doing it should be a crime. You are murdering a child in development. Unless the mother has been raped, often times a victim of incest, in which case abortion can be considered as an option to prevent negative consequences.

Notice I've written abortion in italic. That's because people against abortion tend to say abortion and murder are one and the same expect on such cases where they differenciate between the terms. Not necessarily in this topic, I haven't even read all the answers, but I've seen this joke many times.

Contradictions happen all the time but this one takes home the gold for hipocrisy. The way I see it, abortion is an argumentative nightmare. If you say it is acceptable under some circumstances, you are basically agreeing with pro-choice people because no one would have an abortion the same way they have coffee. If you say something like "If you are raped by your drunken father, your inbred baby is a blessing" you are basically destroying a person's spirit.

True and thats why in my eyes it can never be allowed to kill a conscious human and this is an ultimate line. Even if you are going to consider the situation, its about the essence of the deed. So for me abortion is not immoral in essence and should be allowed in certain situations while theft is wrong in essence and can never be allowed in a society that has the concept of posession

Moral
Ethics

In both these definitions what is it that comes up the most? It certainly isn't society, or defined by society.

Morality and ethics is by definition determining what is right and what is wrong. These definitions come right from websters.

I don't understand why people still think they can pick and choose in these situations and that makes them "moral." It makes you a hypocrite. Like someone else said, isn't it funny how killing a fetus is murder on all accounts unless that person is a victim of rape or incest, apparently that changes the whole definition.

Language is simple, words don't change, they are solid. If you take the side that killing a fetus is murder than you should accept that there are no exceptions. Why should a rape victim be special, that child did nothing wrong. It didn't get a choice to be concieved by that method. That child can have all kinds of possibilities in the future, but you deny that child a future yet force a future on someone who is unprepared but had consentual sex?

It's just like I said earlier, you either take all life as sacred or no life is sacred.

In both these definitions what is it that comes up the most? It certainly isn't society, or defined by society.

Frankly morality is a concept wich meaning cant be found in a dictionary. Outside society there are no morals, this is why people for instance didnt mind black slaves. These were people outside of their society this they didnt apply their morals on them.


This is true.
However you can say that abortion as an act is not killing but still undesirable and only to be applied in certain situations.

Also certain very extreme cases can break morals because they are no harm to morality as a whole.

Ex 1. executing a Dictator, this will be allowed cause this is such an extreme situation that people will not see this as a threat to them.

Ex 2. Use of research done by nazis using human test subjects.

Though to be fair, irregardless of government agency, mankind at one point had to research the human body and obviously had human subjects. How else could we study biology?

I disagree with Jacob's premise that either "All life is sacred or no life is sacred". Instead, I'll say this: "Life is sacred, to each individual."

In other words, the life of a dog is sacred to a dog. A life of a Human Being *should* be sacred to a Human. Proof of this is in the Animal Kingdom: Each species of animal values its life as sacred, and its prey as irrelevant.

As Humans, we domain over the Animal Kingdom(as well as Plants) thereby all other
lifeforms are irrelevant to us. You could argue(and in fact it is) a separate ecosystem from ours(that happens to be converged on a single planet)

Yet, it is actually because of their value as "food" that makes them sacred. Without a delicate balance between life and sacrifice, both of our ecosystems will dissipate.

Without plants, we won't have Co2 which allows us to breath oxygen and live. Without a certain protection of certain animals, we won't have clothing or food, we'll starve, freeze to death under winter conditions, etc.

This is actually along the lines of Kyoko Sakura from Madoka:

"Witches eat Humans, and we eat those Witches."

Witches, Humans and Familiars act in synergy to perpetuate the other's existence and it would disturb the "balance" to entirely eliminate one or the other.

The elimination of a few, in a generational process will eventually wipe out
a civilization. Just look at the Endangered Species list, they weren't endangered originally.

But they lost a few, who lost a few, who lost a few.

Abortion is immoral and wrong, not only from the perspective of the individual zygote who is being massacred by the arrogant "Human Being",
who is no superior only in his/her consciousness alone but from the survival standpoint of the Human Race.

http://www.tomorrowsworld.org/node/782

http://www.slate.com/articles/technology/future_tense/2013/01/world_population_may_actually_start_declining_not_exploding.single.html

You don't have to be political to see the hypocritical, arrogant and dangerously flawed thinking that'll put us in the same peril as China.

Food for thought: The Baby Boomers start retiring/dying off, their younger generation has been taught "Career> Family Life" And so forth it goes with a lesser generation than the last.

We are our own worst enemy

On corpses not on living people. Nazi doctors did experiments like letting people freeze to death to research the human vitality.




I think its more about society then about species. animals kill their own kind. Suvival of the species is not a goal set by nature, its just that all the species that didnt work towards that got wiped out.
With humans its the life similar to them that is sacred, not the unborn baby, not the people in another part of the world, only regular citizens like they are.



Still there are way more flies then humans and they can kill us in big numbers, same goes for rats.



this is where we started breeding cows, we produce our own balance.



we grow our own plants for clothing, and maybe someday we will be able to make machines that turn carbondioxide into oxygen. your idea applies to hunter/gather type of humans we made the transition to farmers a very long time ago.



They got endangered because they arent the fittest, they have a biological dissadvantage so they die out



So you make your morals based on survival? I got bad news for you, the human species on a grandscale is less relevant then the fly I crushed this morning Also it would make a lot more sense to survival to abort all the people with weak genes and only let the strong ones be born


We got 7 Billion people and only one earth, as it stands we dont even have enough space to give every person a decent life. We need less humans not more, this doest mean we will die out, it just means that the living standard will go up for the people that are alive.

That is more a issue of unequal consumption/distribution of resources. Also, technology is always evolving, and can make providing a decent life for as many people as possible easier(for example, water treatment facilities to address water scarcity)

Well if we would distribute it so that every person could live like an american we would need 4 times the space of the earth. It's not about water, there is enough water to provide for all humans. It's about the space we need to produce, energy, food,... . Technology can improve efficienty but it wont make miracles happen.

Hey failboat. Not to blatantly call you out again because your math is rediculously horrible but you're an idiot when it comes to mathmatics.

There's approximately 7 billion people on the planet. That might seem like a lot of people, that would take up a lot of space, but that's where again you're wrong.

There is 6 billion acres of space in north america, (including central america and the islands)

Almost enough for each person on the planet to own an acre of land in north america alone.

There's a total of an estimated 36.8 billion acres of land on the earth. That's roughly 5 and a quater acres of land per person to be shared on the entire planet.

That's not counting the people who want to live in apartments, high rise condos, etc.

For all you people out there, an acre is slighly smaller than an american football field. 4046 square metres for the metric people or 4 square kilometres. An american football field is 1.34 acres.

Each person on the planet could own 4 american football fields of land.

Continue to tell me how the planet isn't big enough.

If you took the entire population of the world, and were to place them in the living conditions of how people live on the island of new york, that city would be the same size as alberta and saskatchewan in canada. Both those provinces combined would be enough space for the entire planet to live like people do on new york island. An area roughly 1/6th the size of canada.

I can give leniece to people who use facts to their own advantage, but nothing bothers me more than people who blatantly get the facts wrong and can't even do the math for themselves.

Did you even know that one person can grown enough food to live their entire lives on 1/8th of an acre. ONE EIGHTH OF AN ACRE CAN FEED A PERSON.

1 billion acres to feed the entire population and then some, 36.8 billion acres on the planet. People would still have nearly 4 america football fields of space to build houses.

Im going to try to be the better man here and not dissrespect you like you did me.

First of all I just finished first year engineering wich means I atleast have a fairly decent understanding of mathematics.

Second, the space people take up is influenced by a lot of different factors, not only housing (that doesnt take much space at all) but primeraly, food, energy,...
A much used method for measuring this is

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ecological_footprint
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_ecological_footprint
http://www.popsci.com/environment/article/2012-10/daily-infographic-if-everyone-lived-american-how-many-earths-would-we-need

So if you live like an american you take up 8 Ha of the world now lets go back to your 6 billion acres that is almost 2.5 billion ha and about 500 million people so lets do the math 500 million times 8 makes 4 billion wich is smaller than 2.5 billion. Now you can repeat this on a global scale and you will see that you lack space even without considering all the mass of land that cant be used for production.

Now you can ignore these numbers and say that you dont even need 1 acre of land but thats just pretending you dont see. These figures are real and if it werent for poor people using almost no land we would have run out of space long ago

Except the average america doesn't consume 8 ha of the world. The top 1% of america society consumes more resources than the bottom 80% of america combined. So it's a highly falsified statement to believe that.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QPKKQnijnsM

If the average person lived with the same consumption as the average american, with the majority of americans being below the line of poverty. It would make a large difference.

average takes everyone in consideration the poor and the rich. So the lots of poor people balance out for the rich people. An average person is neither rich nor poor he is average and he takes up 8 ha. A rich person takes up way more then 8 and a poor person probably less. Actually middleclass can often decrease their footprint by spending money on it, while poor people have it increased because they cant afford to lower it with money.

lets take your estimation into consideration:

lets take 1000 random americans, this would mean according to you 10 people in the top, 800 in the bottom and 190 in between. So according to you these 10 people take more then the 800 combined.
Ok we got 8000 ha for all these people together now lets take the average of brazil wich is 3 ha. Now keep in mind that a poor american probably has more then an average brazilian. so if these 800 people eached lived on 3 ha they would tazke 2400 ha this would mean that the top had 240 ha each. now if you go on a population of 500 million, this means 5 million people living on 240 ha each. so unless you have 5 millions people taking 24 times more space then an avarage person in Qatar (10Ha) your numbers are pure fantasy.

But its not only America, Belgium (my own country) has the same average. if you earn 1000 euros a month here (really low and hard to make a living with), you probably have an ecological footprint higher then we can give all people with the space we got.

Except you are pulling this quote out of no where are expecting me to believe it which I don't. I'm no expert on human population patterns and I'm definately not a realestate expert but with that said, the average american does not take up 8 ha of space.

Infact the most I can ever find in any of my searches is that the average person owns 1/4 of an acre, and 1-2 acres on a high end street. That's a long shot from your 8 ha of space.

Also for someone who said he's good with math, allow me to explain the issue here.

The population of america: 313,900,000
Amount of hectars per person according to you: 8
Amount of acres in a hectar: 2.47 (for our sake of clean numbers, i'll say 2.5)
Amount of acres in america: 2,379,964,800

Now lets do some math.

313,900,000 times 8 equals 2,511,200,000 ha
Convertion time: 2.5 ac in ha
2,511,200,000 times 2.5 equals 6,278,000,000 acres

Total space in america: 2.3 billion acres
Total space for average american by your numbers: 6.3 billion acres
Total land impossibility: 3,898,035,200

By your numbers the average america uses up about 3.9 billion more acres of space than is available in america.

Do you not see an issue with your claim yet?

Do You need me to repeat myself? it's not about the land you own that you live on, it's about the land that is needed to produce what you consume. For instance if you eat a steak, that comes from a cow. You need land to grown cows so while you dont own this land, it is needed for your consumption and can't be used by anyone else.

I have already linked a list of averages by country. Close your eyes all you want, it wont solve any problems.



Well not all things consumed by americans is produced in america, so you just take up global space. If you for instance eat a banana you don't take up space in north america but somewhere else. Since the average in for instance africa is so low we actually have enough space. If all countries had the 8ha average we would have a huge problem.

Except that america doesn't live off africa, there are very little imports that come from africa. Not to mention that in your example, the banana that you so graciously refer to, also feeds the locals. That land isn't solely american, a percentage of the crops goes to bidding nations and the locals take what they need to survive. One acre of banana tree fields could be feeding people from australia, japan, america and england, all at the same time.

Don't over exaggerate your numbers. The math doesn't lie.

Averaging might factor in the rich, but for this discussion the rich do not represent the accurate consumption of the american people. For averages to be correct the correlation between people needs to be relatively small, somewhere between a 20% gap between the top end and the bottom end to get an accurate representation of the people. That isn't even remotely close to what actually happens. The average america if you factor out the rich, live on approx 2/3 of what the min wage of canada lives on.

Just compare min wage averages, the proof is right there.

Ofcourse america has a lot of import, if you are going to drop the really rich in your average you also have to drop the really poor so it woud not change a lot. Besides thats not the point, the point is if we had the same global average as america has nationally we would need 4 earths. It's not only about food, it's also about energy.

Anyway I linked you the number wich are based on actual production why dont you take one of the numerous tests yourself. You can either ignore it or accept a problem.

Also someone who eats cheap MC donalds food the whole week cost more space then someone who buys more expensive vegtables. Comparing wages is not the same as comparing Ecological footprint