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Depends on the circumstance I guess. In my situation I really didn't have too much input into R's decision to terminate, although it was what I want her to do. I'm not a woman so I can't say this for sure, but the guilt that my ex has felt over the years would be a tiny percentage of the guilt she would've felt had she have gone through and had the child then gave it away.
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Well for starters let me say that I am wholly opposed to the current convention of excluding fathers from
all and any input in the process. Secondly I have to ask why she would have felt guilty when her child was living as opposed to not? Thirdly I have to ask why this guilt would outweigh whatever guilt she might have after an abortion? Lastly I have to ask why we must consider this guilt to be the principle imperative involved in the decision?
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For the record Kostya, when do you feel the life of a child begins? I guess in my opinion it starts, as you put it, when the child begins breathing oxygen (an explaination that still has me scratching my head a bit), but where is your line in the sand? Bit of a tough one...
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For the record, I do not believe at all in the somewhat curious business of drawing lines where none ought to be. The fact of the matter is that our concepts regarding these things are vague. While I think that there is a qualitative difference between a seven cell zygote and a 20 week foetus, I don't think there is any point during the interceding time where it makes sense to simply draw a line. If indeed you are going to draw a line, and we need to in order to legislate apparently, I think it ought to be drawn well well back, so that we may be sure that in
spite of the vagueness, our line is on the right side of the two concepts we wish to delineate.
This being said, I don't think our decisions on such matters rest solely on what is and is not a baby, a foetus, a human etc.
For instance, we agree that a newborn baby has intellectual abilities less impressive than those we might assign to a dolphin or a chimp, and yet if faced with a choice between killing one or the other, almost all folk would choose Flipper to die and preserve the baby in spite of the fact that at the time, the dolphin is actually endowed with the intellect of a 4 year old (I find these kinds of claims dubious, but
even if they could be verified, I would prefer the dolphin to bite the dust.)
Consequently, our decisions around these sorts of issues,
are not, though we oftwise seem to forget it, informed merely by what things are at the time. The fact that the dolphin is smarter than the baby at that particular time is not the long and short of our assessment, for we all know the baby has the potential to become a fully grown human being, fulfilling all our expectations of what is to be valued about human life, while the dolphin shall never be anything more than it is. This
potential is quite compelling in our decision about babies, so too it ought to be in our decisions about cell clusters
at any stage since the gradual qualitative change between a seven cell zygote to a 20 week foetus to a newborn infant in no way changes the
potential of that being, which is constant.
Therefore, because I believe that the controversy lies in the potential, and because the potential remains the same between these vague concepts of zygote, foetus, baby I am not too concerned to delineate between them when in order to make decisions about it.
On the other hand, I am deeply puzzled, disturbed even, by your assertion that there is some kind of
moral difference between a breathing thing and a non-breathing thing...