Jinn

I voted "Abortion is right", because my only feeling about abortion is that I wish more people would partake.

My ethical system is very much rooted in the belief of our material limitations, and I try not to ascribe animacy when there is clearly none. It's clear WHY we ascribe animacy to inanimate objects, why we give reasons to things when they are truly coincidence, and why we believe 'life' or 'intelligent consciousness' is present when it is clearly not. It has evolutionary and cognitive advantages, and I'm not in the least surprised why we retain it in our modern psyches.

With that said, I do not believe human life begins until the moment of birth. I have a solid scientific backing and am aware of what it tells about cognitive development in the third trimester, but it does little to convince me that it is 'intelligent life' any more than a believe a virus is. Even if I were to agree with the mainstream belief that 'late term abortions' are unethical (as I do in all cases except in the brutal honesty of internet anonymity), I would still not believe that 'potential life' would trump the rights of the woman. Many times the child may survive, but the woman does not. I believe that in all cases we should attempt to save the woman at the expense of the fetus. There are also cases where women were compelled by law to perform a cesarian section to remove a baby prematurely after the woman was diagnosed with cancer. The logic (and unfortunate legal precedent) is that the woman was largely a 'lost cause' and ought to be sacrificed in order to give the child a chance at survival. After all, if the fetus' host died, it wouldn't survive, either. Had the woman chosen that route, I'd be alright with it; but she was compelled by the DA (ankle shackles and all) to undergo C-section to remove the baby and died as a result.

This is by no means the norm, just as 'abortion on demand' is a misnomer. That said, the posters above are very right in discussing sentience. Without that distinction, we'd have certain ethical dilemmas regarding alreadylegal processes, such a putting down a pet whose quality of life has been determined by its owners to be negligible.

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"I'm typing on a computer of science, which is being sent by science wires to a little science server where you can access it. I'm not typing on a computer of philosophy or religion or whatever other thing you think can be used to understand the universe because they're a poor substitute in the role of understanding the universe which exists independent from ourselves." - Willravel