Abortion

If you noticed I said "there is no formal layout to this debate" in the opening, therefore, comments are fair game just as anyone would also vote on some of the responses to questions outside of a formal debate in a presidential election. So voters, also use the comments and responses to those comments to vote. So if I need to, I will continue into the comments. But just to appease you: I will first address this statement "There can be no perfect standard that all humans judge morality upon." This is false. The accurate statement would be that "There is a perfect moral standard but not all humans choose to judge morality upon it due to their own use of free will." If morality is objective and discovered, then there must be, by necessity, a perfect giver of perfect morality from which all varying levels of morality are compared. Therefore, there is a perfect moral standard. Next I address your example of your 8 year old cousin. Just because someone does not understand the gravity of a situation or the depth of a circumstance, does that make the gravity or depth non existent? Of course not. In an analogy, I doubt your 8 year old cousin understands the importance and existence of BC Calculus, but the Calculus still exists outside of his subjective opinion and understanding of the Calculus. The same can be said for morality. Just because some people do not care about the morality of the situation or do not recognize the moral weight of a situation does not mean an objective moral weight of the situation exists outside of their subjective opinion of the situation. I will address every question simply as possible and then provide an overall theme for the topic. 1. It is not more, rather it is EQUALLY permissible and tragic to save the fetus and let the mother die. 2. Letting both the mother and fetus die is far more tragic than saving one or the other. However, whoever lets both die is not committing and act of immorality because who ever allows both to die is not actually initiating the cause by which both die. Neither the mother, the fetus, nor the doctor who lets both die have any moral culpability. 3. Saving the mother and letting the fetus die is equally as permissible and tragic as saving the fetus and letting the mother die. 4. Innocence can only be applied to beings with free will. Only human beings have free will. Therefore NO animal is subject to either innocence or guilt. The fetus would remain innocent because the fetus has free will but not the ability to openly use free will. This is the same case as when a 2 year old child kills a woman in Walmart. The 2 year old child cannot act on his or her own free will, which he or she possesses, but cannot control yet. Therefore, just as the 2 year old child remains innocent, a fetus would remain innocent as well. < http://www.foxnews.com...... >. So because the fetus has free will, but cannot yet use the free will, the fetus is innocent. 5.The 2 year old child did not know he or she was killing the woman, but the 2 year old child is still truly human. Therefore, this doesn't show the fetus to be not "truly human." 6. The bear can neither be innocent nor guilty because the bear does not have free will. Also, we can put down a bear because a bear does not have the same intrinsic worth protected by an inalienable right to life that a human being has. 7. The fetus remains human, as it has free will, but also remains innocent, for it cannot yet act upon that free will. Here is the overall theme. Because it was not refuted against, I will quote once again my last debate but then expand upon it: "Your situation where either the mother dies or the fetus dies is a very valid question that is brought up quite often. And here is where we have to weigh culpability. Both are innocent. Both have the right life. This is hard for some people to accept, but, fundamentally, both have the EQUAL right to life. Even the Catholic faith holds that saving the mother would be equally as noble but also inherently equally tragic as saving the child. So in fact, yes, this is the only circumstance where abortion is permissible because two equal innocent lives are at risk. Since their is an inalienable right to life, it would be better to save one innocent life than neither life. And furthermore, choosing either to save to mother or fetus does not make the person morally culpable for this reason: A good deed is always inherently above/better/higher than a bad deed of equal gravity (in this case killing). The good deed of saving the innocent mother is inherently above/better/higher than the bad deed of having to abort/kill the fetus. I am not contradicting anything I have stated because my overall theme, applied to any situation, is supporting the inalienable right to life. This debate happens to be on abortion. Therefore i should also add saving the fetus would be inherently better then the act of letting the mother die." I also must talk about intention: Looking at intention is very important in determining a moral circumstance. Applied to abortion, we can say that if we save the mother and abort the fetus we view it as such: The intention is to save the mother but results in the death of the fetus. Because a good deed is inherently better than a bad of equal moral gravity, then intentionally saving the mother is permissible if the fetus must be aborted, however, the death of the fetus is still tragic. Same goes for vice versa. In your closing sentence you say "Furthermore, should it not be acceptable for a woman to control what grows within or on her own being?" This only applies to an extent. "The right to swing my fist ends where another man's nose begins"- Oliver Wendell Holmes. I often use this quote in relation to abortion. The primary reason is that this quote vividly and simplistically illustrates that my right to do what I want cannot infringe upon someone else rights, especially his or her inalienable rights. Since the fetus is both living and a human being, and every human being has the inalienable right to life, and since abortion is the killing of the fetus, then abortion infringes upon the inalienable right to life of the human being living within the mother, therefore abortion is wrong. The mother does not have the right to kill her own child by removing the inalienable right to life from the child." Furthermore, you still are only showing how categorization of life in science is fuzzy. There is "a gray area in classification." That is wonderful, but the only argument for life of the fetus is the "living vs. non living argument" thus your argument is still irrelevant because we aren't trying to put a fetus into a certain phylum, kingdom etc. So you do admit that the fetus is alive. "While i will also agree the fetus is alive clinically..." why wouldn't the merriam webster definition then be the most appropriate? If you admit the fetus is alive, then you must admit "removing" or "terminating" the fetus is causing the death of the fetus. Thus the fetus, you must admit, as you already have, is alive. The reason we don't consider a virus to be alive is that the virus "cannot reproduce without the use of the host cell and lacks typical cell-division approach to reproduction" The fetus, as a zygote, cellularly divides after conception, and therefore reproduces in a way the is represented under scientific definition of life. It is easy to see that the reason a virus is not alive and the way a fetus IS alive. Therefore I have negated your comparison of life of a fetus to pseudo-life of a virus. < http://scienceline.ucsb.edu... >. If the zygote is fertilized, has a new unique human DNA, and was conceived from a sperm and egg cell from two human beings and therefore inherently has potential, then yes, the zygote would be a human. And it would have rights, because I have shown prior, rights exist outside of time and location. Rights exist beyond laws. Therefore, even though the fetus is not a citizen, it has a right to life. Lets make an analogy, say I am in Antarctica and you kill me. I was not protected by American laws, but did I have the right to live? Yes I did. Rights extend beyond laws. Here is what makes us living humans, and it must be all of these things: Unique human DNA, growth towards biological complexity, conceived with free will, great mental acuity, and self awareness but growth into the ability to use all of those things. A gorilla does not have free will. A gorilla does not formulate pre-meditated plans. A gorilla does not build a barrier to stop a river from flooding. They cannot act in free will because they do not have free will. Also, you admit our mental acuity is different from a gorilla which is a good sign of being human. The baby has free will, just not the ability to use it yet. The gorilla never had free will to begin with. "Self-awareness is the capacity for introspection and the ability to recognize oneself as an individual separate from the environment and other individuals. It is not to be confused with consciousness." So the gorilla can do an in depth recognition of its own life and make planned actions to change something in its life? So do you honestly believe the 30 second old baby knows it is crying for attention? The crying is more instinctual dealing with a reaction to a change in environment. Furthermore, the baby does not yet realize it is a baby, but is conceived with self awareness, just not the ability to use it. The fetus, even if you can definitively claim is parasitic, then, does not deserve to die, as you agree. Therefore, it deserves to live because the fetus is an innocent human being. But I will also take this a step further, and guess what, because I made it openly acknowledged this debate will have no layout, the comment sections can be used...Which I will do now.