Are there any secular arguments for Pro-Life? Or is it purely a religious/philosophical/moral debate? If so...

Are there any secular arguments for Pro-Life? Or is it purely a religious/philosophical/moral debate? If so, what are the arguments?

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If God is dead everything is allowed.

>implying morality can't be secular

It destroys personal responsibility in society. It's also flat out murder.

secularprolife.org/

No. Omnicidal sadomasochistic psychopathy is the inevitable logical consequence of disbelief in any kind of spiritual metaphysics. If atheists were honest with themselves they'd stop parading around and posturing in their handmedown comfort blanket of residual Christian morality and just start killing everyone.

unless the child would have significant birth defects or the mother would be in exceptional medical hazard, it's just kind of lame to abort a baby due to it being an inconvenience.

i was an unplanned birth in a fairly poor household, and i am still absolutely thankful for my birth.

We are social animals, intelligent monkeys. We usually will try to get along, because fighting is costly and rarely worth the risk, and because we're hard-wired to empathise.

So?

Murder is bad mostly because it eliminates a person's future. This is why it is not as bd to kill a really old man as it is to kill a child. When you define murder as being bad because of this reason, abortion is obviously bad. The fetus has an entire life to live.

Personally I think it's hypocritical to be fine with some murder and not with others.

The argument that a human isn't a person because they're not conscious isn't even taken seriously by the pro-choice crowd, because we recognize the rights of non-conscious lumps of cells all the time.

To elaborate, the Pro-Choice position is only intelligible through a mangled religious reasoning: People become ensouled at some arbitrary point, and once they become ensouled, they have certain rights regardless of their particular physical arrangement, because it is this soul that is the real self. They just insist that ensoulment happens at an arbitrarily convenient point (usually 6 or 9 months).

Peter Singer has a simple proof for why he believes abortion is wrong:

The taking of innocent human life is wrong
Fetuses are innocent human lives
Therefore, the killing of fetuses is wrong

I would tend to agree with this. While I believe that abortion is unethical I don't think it should be illegal.

In my view it essentially comes down to human rights and when we are granted them. Pro-lifers, who are more often than not conservative, believe human rights are granted to all no matter what. It's basically the mentality of the republic, to protect the minority from the majority, the weak from the strong. So they feel the fetus' life, as an equal under basic human rights, is more important than the mother's convenience.
Pro-choicers are a bit more lenient when it comes to human rights, if they feel they can justify it rationally. In the pro-choicer view the mother and the fetus are not equal under universal human rights, and the mother's convenience gets priority over the fetus' life.

There's also an element of blame towards the mother for getting pregnant in the first place.

There is no morality. There is however rational agency and cooperation. Agency and communicability are the only thing that matters since that's what's needed to negotiate behavioral exchanges. That's what 'rights' really are.

What follows is that fetuses have neither of those things. Therefore they cannot be the subjects of rights. They can be the objects of course but so can anything. What's relevant is that without will/sentience/agency these are biological 'objects' and thus can't have rights and it can't be 'wrong' to destroy them, in principal.

Now, born infants up through toddlerhood roughly also do not have agency and such. However, unlike a fetus inside a woman (which makes the fetus simply part of her body like her liver or feet are) society can reasonably express an interest in protecting a born infant against the will of its parents because it's no longer its mothers body part. It can be protected in the interest of society as an object (for various reasons but its immaterial).

There for we should accept abortion and not infanticide, as an ordinary matter to the extent circumstances allows us to afford it.

Abortion is the celebration of privilege.

Coma patients have rights. Where's the agency and communicability with them?

If they are in a permenent and incurable coma then no, they don't have rights.

zygotes aint self-aware, non self-aware creatures don't need any rights
I'd consider giving rights to dolphins before a lump of tissue that happens to be in the right spot

Are you planning to sleep tonight?

>non self-aware creatures don't need any rights

Okay, so we can throw out the rights of infants, retards, people in comas, hypnotized people, sleeping people and indians.

Who else can we justify fucking over? The less people with rights, the greater the convenience for people with rights.

Sleep is temporary. It's a suspension of agency not a loss of it.

on the other hand if we're going to give rights to semi-autonomous masses of human tissue, we might as well give rights to sperm and cancer

>people this biologically illiterate are allowed to post on Veeky Forums
Save me Veeky Forums

Give human rights to non-human things?

Killing everyone is dumb and counter productive

how is cancer originating in a human body not human?

A tumour isn't an entire living human organism at a certain stage of its lifecycle.

True. Makes me think of the lack of rights of terrorists though.

>Are there any secular arguments for Pro-Life?

Yeah, murder is illegal thus killing a fetus that can become fully developed human being is generally speaking murder.

It dose depend on the mothers body for sustenance but in the day and age of contraceptives a pregnancy is either wanted or a case of extreme negligence.

As such, to murder a fetus to fix your situation is inexcusable.


that's the argument and I consider it have more internal integrity than the current situation


however abortion is a practical murder, the same with the death convicts, victims of war etc.

we created an exception from the rules so we can murder "some" people, when that is convenient to us.

You could argue that rights are only for agents which are autonomous. Agents that have a free choice and can reflect on their actions.

So this would exclude toddlers as well.

However it makes sense that people in comas and sleeping people deserve rights as well because they only temporarily lost their autonomy. Since a fetus is a future man, it is therefore logically murder to kill it.

its a living mass of human tissue that no longer operates as a functional part of a person's body
its biologically human and has about as much self awareness as a zygote

>its a living mass of human tissue
That isn't an entire human organism.

>that no longer operates as a functional part of a person's body
A human isn't defined by personhood.

>its biologically human
But it isn't biologically A human.

>and has about as much self awareness as a zygote
A human isn't defined by self-awareness.

>Since a fetus is a future man, it is therefore logically murder to kill it.

It's agency hasn't been established yet, so it doesn't follow. A temporary loss of something you have is different than a potential gain of something you never had in the first place.

The most commonly cultured tumor cells are from Henrietta Lacks who is dead at this point.
From that point of view her distinctly human cancer cells are the entierety of HL at that stage of her life.

It's a natural result though.

What's the difference to the individual in question?

That it isn't an individual yet.

That's biologically false, and any embryologist will attest to this

>>however abortion is a practical murder, the same with the death convicts, victims of war etc.
>we created an exception from the rules so we can murder "some" people, when that is convenient to us.
This. Abortion is necessary to keep people from the bottom of society from giving birth to even more kids who are going to be a netto drain on society.
It's also used by dumb kids who manage to get pregnant. It's better to heavily promote anti-conception for teenagers. It would be a good thing if conservatives and christians realised this. It prevents girls from having to turn to abortion as a last ditch effort to get rid of a kid they don't want or can raise.

My grandfather outright told me that if his mother had known about contraception, he wouldn't exist. He was the youngest son of a poor woman who had been widowed at least once, I think twice, by the time he came around. He went on to become a college professor.

For what it's worth, she managed to have all her children in wedlock, as far as I know.

>it's just kind of lame to abort a baby due to it being an inconvenience.

Why? What makes inconvenience a bad reason?

I mean, the US bombs drones people all the time because they're inconvenient.

I don't think you should be getting your morals from the American government.

No, but the point is that many adults are murdered every single day, simply because they are inconvenient people.

And that's adult, grown up people, and not a barely grown fetus.

The sleeping person negotiated an agreement to not be murdered in exchange for not murdering others (including while said parties are asleep) before he fell asleep and will continue to uphold this agreement upon waking. The same isn't true of the fetus or permanently incapacitated (coma, dead, etc.)

A human cancer cell begins as a component cell of a human organism. It remains a component cell and does not become a distinct organism even if it is removed from the human organism. Such a cancer cell is merely an isolated component cell. If it divides you merely have two component cells, and so on.

A fetus on the other hand begins as a distinct organism at conception. The sperm and the egg, like cancer cells, are merely component cells of organisms. When they fuse, they become a new distinct human organism. A cancer cell can never become a human organism, no matter how it multiplies, because it's just a component cell of an organism, and remains so even if isolated.

Kill yourself

>The sleeping person negotiated an agreement to not be murdered in exchange for not murdering others (including while said parties are asleep) before he fell asleep and will continue to uphold this agreement upon waking.
So what's stopping someone from entering into an agreement to continue their personhood and property rights after death? Loads of people have entered into such agreements.
>The same isn't true of the fetus or permanently incapacitated (coma, dead, etc.)
Do you have a copy of this agreement?

Millions of third worlders are flooding into our countries because our populations are collapsing because of abortion and contraception. In some Western countries a quarter of pregnancies end in abortion. You're going to get poor, stupid people one way or another.

>So what's stopping someone from entering into an agreement to continue their personhood and property rights after death?

They're no longer agents. They can make certain requests about most-mortem affairs but they can only trust that people will abide by them.

>Do you have a copy of this agreement

The agreement is principally tacit and unwritten although most people do in fact codify these agreements in the form of laws. I don't see your point.

ayyy
The fact that our birth rates are stagnating doesn't mean we should import third worlders. Look at Japan. Modern medicine is granting us longer and longer lives, and there is a possibility a method to postpone, stop or even reverse ageing is going to be developed this century. The productive part of our lives will be longer, decreasing the need for births.

That's not the reason why you sperglord.

The reason why the West is having less children is because you don't have to when you're rich(whereas you do as a farmer in India, because you need farmhands), and conversely, having children is expensive as hell in most Western countries.

What is the distinction between "secular" and "philosophical" here?

Doesn't mean that it's right

Idk I just thought I'd cover all the bases

1. Individual living humans have a right to live.
2. Causing a human life to end is homicide.
3. Unjustifiable, deliberate, homicide is murder.
4. The smallest unit of life is a cell. Cells are building blocks of life, and things composed of living cells are alive. This is one of the basic tenets of biology.
5. Zygotes are composed of cells, therefore zygotes composed of living cells are alive.
6. DNA of a living zygote in a human mother can be analyzed.
7. If DNA analysis of a living zygote in a human mother determines that it is: a) human; and b) a distinct individual from the mother; then it is an individual, living, human.
8. Ending the life of an individual human zygote is homicide.
9. Deliberately ending the life of an individual human zygote without justification is murder.

Are you saying morality and philosophy aren't secular?

It's just a zygote, not a living human being.
It may become a adult human but it doesn't have any consciousness.
It's just a ball of cells like a leaf or tree bark.

Maybe it would be a good idea to teach third-worlders about contraception and abortion then, instead of us just starting to multiply as fuck?

I'm not against abortion, but i find it hard to deny that it is murder. Being poorly developed, essentially incredibly young, does not mean it is not a human.

>9. Deliberately ending the life of an individual human zygote without justification is murder.
Theres the rub. They have their justification.

Lets say a woman whose always struggled to get pregnant manages to, and she finds out at 3 weeks. You come along and kill her ball of cells inside her body.

Why is she crying, incredibly upset and angry with you, when you only did the same as killing a leaf?

it all boils down to how you define "life" and how you attribute moral value to it.

what typical religious arguments basically do, is defining life in a way that it includes early states. they also attribute a miximized moral value for any life.

as a direct result anything that compromises such life is morally reprehensible.


however: that's not necessarily a religious position. if you have (subjectively) plausible secular points of view that result in both premises - you'll also derive the same conclusion.

that's quite unlikely though, since reasonable people tend to have much more sensible moral intuitions to base their moral premises on

A fetus is not an individual living organism for the first month or two. Which is exactly what the cut off for an abortion is.

Once a fetus develops a brain and can respond to outside stimuli, it's a living individual and cannot be aborted legally.

>A human cancer cell begins as a component cell of a human organism.
The same is true for an Embryo. It begins as an egg cell.

>It remains a component cell and does not become a distinct organism even if it is removed from the human organism.
Define distinct organism. By most definitions it would fulfill them to the same degree a fetus would. Define component cell even. The main interaction that the human body has with a cancer cell is involuntarily feeding it since it by definition ignores various signals stemming from the body.
The best argument you have at this point is the seperated circulatory systems of fetus and host.

>Such a cancer cell is merely an isolated component cell. If it divides you merely have two component cells, and so on.
Until a fertilized egg cell starts differentiating its cells this is also true for it.

>A fetus on the other hand begins as a distinct organism at conception. The sperm and the egg, like cancer cells, are merely component cells of organisms. When they fuse, they become a new distinct human organism. A cancer cell can never become a human organism, no matter how it multiplies, because it's just a component cell of an organism, and remains so even if isolated.

Explain why it becomes a new and distinct human organism.
The only thing that happens when they fuse is that the sperm introduces its DNA to the cell.
If DNA was introduced into a cell via retrovirus would that cell become a new and distinct human organism?

The reaction of the woman would hardly be conclusive as to whether or not the fetus should be considered a full human being.
The consequences of the action do not need to stem from whether the fetus would be considered a full human being or not.
You would have violated her freedom to accomplish this and caused, regardless of whether or not the zygote is considered human, property damage.
If someone greatly valued an object they may also become greatly emotional due to the loss of it.

I'm fine with abortion, i'd just like to have a get out of jail free card also if i got some chick pregnant on accident.

Because doing so would lead to a society that sucked and I have rational (and purely pragmatic) reasons for not wanting to live in a society that sucks.

>They're no longer agents. They can make certain requests about most-mortem affairs but they can only trust that people will abide by them.
Exactly like the sleeping person. Your argument is that because they no longer have the power to enforce their rights. Hell, we don't even need to deal with sleeping people anymore.


>The agreement is principally tacit and unwritten although most people do in fact codify these agreements in the form of laws. I don't see your point.
Oh, well that's good. Abortion is clearly unacceptable because everyone has entered into a tacit agreement not to do it, although lots of people do in fact codify these agreements int he form of laws.

The regularity of this type question makes me think the only reason theists aren't mass murderers is because 'God says nope'.

Is the only reason you're not a mass murderer because you're spooked as fuck?

At which point in pregnancy does it stop being 'just a bunch of cells' and starts being something with self-awareness?

There is no distinct point, it's a gradient/spectrum not a dichotomy.

Would you rather be alive or would you rather your parents have aborted you?

The latter

These

>These

...are all easily refutable.

Not really.

>Oh, well that's good. Abortion is clearly unacceptable because everyone has entered into a tacit agreement not to do it

Fetuses have not made this agreement

I don't fancy the idea of not existing therefore I would like to protect the freedom of people who haven't been born yet to make up their own mind about whether or not they like existing.

>Secular
>As opposed to moral
hmmm

it lowers the chance of healthy fetus in future. that is the only rational argument pro-life

My gynaecologist friends told me that it would be good if abortions were illegal because he would made more money on blackmarket abortions.

So I've started spreading pro-life propaganda. Ego-stroking idiots believe they're doing something good by supporting me, lol.

You wish you've had friends like me.

youtube.com/watch?v=xliyujhwhNM

Do you extend this consideration to unfertilized eggs?

No, unfertilized eggs are just an extension of the woman's genetic material and as such the women has the right to do whatever she likes with it. Likewise for sperm. Either of these things on their own is about as much of a human life as that person's skin is life.

>I mean, the US bombs drones people all the time because they're inconvenient.

You'll find people do a lot of shit, that doesn't magically make it the right choice.

I'm pro-choice, I just think your reasoning is faulty as shit.

>No, unfertilized eggs are just an extension of the woman's genetic material

So is a fetus.

>Either of these things on their own is about as much of a human life as that person's skin is life.

Human skin doesn't have to potential to become an individual human being. An unfertilized egg does.

>Since a fetus is a future man
If you kill it then it logically was never going to be a man in the first place.
This logic is nonsensical.
You could argue that a hamburger a pregnant woman eats has the same rights of a person because it is going to become part of the fetus.

human skin can provide stem cells which can be grown into a full human

...

We consider someone legally dead when their brains die (stop working completely) in many countries.
If a fetus' brain has not developed yet, it is not actually working. The brain only starts functioning many months after the pregnancy started.
Therefore a fetus cannot be considered a living human being until short before delivery.
Otherwise we have a logical contradiction in law.
Comatose patients would only be dead in this scenario if they can be proven incurable (which is obviously not possible) or if their brain was mostly destroyed and it therefore as good as dead.

As for the argument that a fetus/cell "will" be a human being, it doesn't really make sense as I mentioned The problem is also that you are just arbitrarily deciding that the fetus "will become" a child.
Where do you draw the line?
When you use a condom you are preventing the sperm and egg to unite, meaning you are killing living cells which would have become babies otherwise.
How is this different?
It's just an illogical, arbitrary line.
Murder is not murder is the being is not a living human.

Pro-lifers purely argue on a dogmatic and religious basis.
There is no real secular reason behind their beliefs, which they want to force on the rest of the population.

>So is a fetus.
No, a fetus is a combination of eggs and sperm.

>Human skin doesn't have to potential to become an individual human being. An unfertilized egg does.
Only if you act upon it. If you just leave an unfertilized egg alone it will not turn into a fetus. A fetus however will when left undisturbed eventually be born.

>Only if you act upon it.
How is this an argument? So if I commit the action of wearing a condom am I also killing the "potential" fetus?

>We consider someone legally dead when their brains die (stop working completely) in many countries.
When their brains stop working it's for good.
However we know for a fact it's only a matter of time until a fetus has a functioning brain. I'm sure if we knew someone who appeared braindead would be perfectly alright in a couple of months then it wouldn't be time to consider them dead just yet.

>Where do you draw the line?
Conception

>When you use a condom you are preventing the sperm and egg to unite, meaning you are killing living cells which would have become babies otherwise.
No because those living cells are simply seperate extensions of yours, and your partners genetic information respectively. It is just as much yours as your hair or nails.

>There is no real secular reason behind their beliefs, which they want to force on the rest of the population.
No, I want to stop the rest of the population from killing people who can't even defend themselves.

>How is this an argument? So if I commit the action of wearing a condom am I also killing the "potential" fetus?
No, by wearing a condom you've simply wasted some sperm. This is no more murder than cutting your hair is murder.

when you leave a baby to its own devices it does not turn into an adult it turns into a dead baby

Argument

The societal costs of abortion > benefits of abortion

Women have far less skin in the game now that they can abjure away many of the consequences of their actions.

Personally, I think abortion is a godsend for "vibrant" people but awful for responsible populations.

Discoveries, such as in vitro fertilization and DNA, have sequenced the human genome, making it clear that from the moment of conception there is a new life, a new being

>No, a fetus is a combination of eggs and sperm.

Is the mother's day genetic material still there? Does the sperm come in and zap the egg's dna away? An egg becoming fertilized does make the statement 'this thing is an extention of this woman's genetic material' false.

>If you just leave an unfertilized egg alone it will not turn into a fetus. A fetus however will when left undisturbed eventually be born.

No, a fetus still needs nutrients and energy to become a born human. Leaving it alone will result in a miscarriage. It still needs things just like an unfertilized egg needs those things plus a sperm cell. The idea that conception is somehow the place where a human starts existing is arbitrary, it's special pleading, it's empty of any rational or moral content.

The people who resort to finagling about the status of the helpless abortees forget something.

The world is a war between developed phenotypes. The only thing that matters are the breeding of beings with ever more developed phenotypes. Intelligence is the mother of morality and in that sense, we have yhe feeblest claims to moral knowledge outside of the comforts of our instincts.