There is a lot to disagree with in your statement.

First, you use "murder" incorrectly. Abortion, in the US, is legal, and therefore not murder. Murder is defined as an illegal killing. That is why when someone is given the death penalty, they are said to be killed, not murdered. We say soldiers kill the enemy, not murder the enemy. By using "murder" you are adopting the conflation that anti-abortion activists have been (apparently) successful in promoting.

Second, nobody doubts that a zygote is alive. Nearly every cell in your body is alive (barring hair, nails, upper layers of skin, recently recycled cells), including sperm and eggs. When an egg and a sperm fuse, the result is also alive. The question is whether the rights of the zygote->blastula->fetus->baby trump the rights of the woman who is carrying it.

Obviously, by the time it becomes a baby, the baby's rights trump the desires of the woman carrying it, in general -- everybody agrees on that. Some people conceive (pun not intended) of the fertilized egg as being fully human, something God ordained and which is the vessel for a soul which has been waiting for that very zygote, and by aborting it, one is subverting God's will and destroying the intended future destiny of that soul.

Others don't share that belief. There is certainly no bright line dividing when that fetus is developed enough that its rights are superior to that of its mother, and deciding where to place that light should not be taken lightly and will cause discomfort. But we deal with such things all the time. It is legal to drive 45 MPH on the street near my house, but not 46. Yes it is somewhat arbitrary but not unreasonable either. That we have to make an uneasy boundary somewhere on the continuum isn't reason to declare that the speed limit should be zero, or that there should be no speed limit at all.

It should also be noted that at the time Roe v Wade was decided, Protestants and even evangelical Protestants by and large were not bothered by the decision. Catholics were, of course. It wasn't until the rise of the Moral Majority that the issue became objectionable to so many religious groups.

I find the definition "unlawful" for murder to be at odds with the common use. People refer to dictators as murderers all the time, even if the dictator unilaterally declared the killings legal. I find "unjustified" to be much more in line with common usage of the word murder.

I gave some examples of common use which contradict your claim.

As for dictators, they are violating international law. Abortion is legal in the US (withing certain parameters), and international law does not declare it to be illegal either.

Killing of armed combatants is considered justified, as is executions of people for capital offenses. Neither contradict my claim (though they don't contradict yours either).

International law primarily regards the interactions between nations rather than the actions within a nation. It is debatable whether or not a nation that is non-signatory to a treaty has violated a law when they fail to abide by its precepts.

I think most people would claim that murder is intrinsically wrong, and is not bad merely because it is contrary to some words on a piece of paper.

People can disagree as to what is unjustified; one person might consider a death in an arranged duel to be murder, while another might consider it justified. Under the law of today it is unlawful, under many laws 200 years ago it would be lawful.

Dictators usually kill illegally, and protect themselves from the consequences with the sheer power they hold. Fascists kill and protect themselves through the idiotic/selfish mass' silent presence on their side.

> Dictators usually kill illegally

Do they? They are the ones who define the law after all.

And to further take this off topic I would like to mention that every church I have been to (mostly Methodist) never even talk about abortion. It just never comes up. Abortion right to life seems to be a favorite topic of some politicians and liberal commentators trying to ostracize Christians.

This is not a case of Christian persecution. Good for you, you are part of a liberal Christian denomination. But there are more than 100M Christians who strongly object to abortion on religious grounds. In most states in the US, there has been a terrible erosion in the ability to get an abortion, and this is due to political leveraging of the issue with Christian support.

http://www.pewforum.org/fact-sheet/public-opinion-on-abortio...

70% of evangelicals are opposed, while 44% of Catholics are. From that you might conclude that since the majority of Catholics are not opposed to abortion that proves your case. That would be wrong. The church and those who oppose it are far more vocal and influential than those who support it.

Really, this topic is in the news all the time. I don't know how the religious connection has escaped you.

It is really interesting that it has escaped me since I have been to a number of religious retreats, events, and have been a regular church goer for about 20 years now. Maybe it is because I live in California.

The "mainline" protestants made a bit of a Faustian bargain on abortion. Like most religionists, their doctrine is determined primarily by what will generate the fullest collection plate. In attempting not to alienate women who've had abortions, they instead alienated judgmental old people, which latter group has got to be any religion's primary customer. Nowadays they're much quieter with their "abortion is OK" dogma.

It'd be so much easier if as a society we agreed that everyone should have healthcare, and that reproduction should be a choice positively made, instead of the default consequence of sex.

Exactly. There's nothing additional that abortion solves that isn't covered by responsible use of contraception except maybe someone changing their mind or I guess more fairly having their economic situation change such that rearing a child is no longer the socially responsible choice. But I think that's something we're equip to handle via other means (adoption).

Failure rates for contraception are surprisingly high, even if you are using it responsibility. 1% is common, but that's not even over a person's lifetime, that's PER YEAR. That make lifetime failure rate more like 20%.

On top of that some people can't tolerate the most effective hormonal birth control methods methods.

Another is medical... some mothers face risk birthing their child and dying, or aborting the child. Deeply traumatized from this myself :(

I doubt rapists put on condoms.

While that would help it doesn't 'fix' the issue. Unintended pregnancies will happen and you will need a moral framework to deal with them. There is no avoiding the matter.

I think contraception has gotten quite good. I don't think the edge cases would excessively burden society in a way we'd be unable to manage. I could see a definition of contraception being something that prevents an egg, fertilized or not, from developing. And then we could define abortion as the act of terminating a developing embryo. I imagine if people had universal access to contraception we'd be more socially willing to push the responsibility of using the tools provided (and generally being sexually educated and responsible) back on the individuals involved.

>> reproduction should be a choice positively made, instead of the default consequence of sex.

Wait what? Reproduction is the default consequence of sex. That's basic biological fact. You can't legislate that away.

You're deliberately misinterpreting what he's saying. Apply that 'logic' to the first clause: Dying of disease or predation alone in a jungle or on a savanah is the default consequence of living. That's biological fact. You can't legislate that away.

I know why you picked that latter bit - it makes a cool sound bite. But it's just wrong, and whatever 'biology' imposes on us, we as a society shouldn't look at those loose shackles and say, "yes, this is the way it must always be."

ALSO, reproduction is the default consequence of a specific kind of sex under certain conditions, it's not like it's a 100% guarantee. Treating it as such makes you sound like a Texas lawmaker's favorite textbook.

I believe the grandparent just means free access to birth control. Ie “With our current technology the default state doesn’t have to be pregnancy anymore.” It’s phrased a bit weirdly, I’ll grant you.

Reproduction is one consequence of one specific sex act.

Hetero vaginal intercourse often doesn't result in procreation, and that's your best shot at it anyway.

There isn't really any universal default consequence, just like there isn't a universal sex act. A lot of people enjoy it, some people feel shame, etc. Life is a spectrum.

I'm not the one who made the statement.

Science didn't fail and actually helps a lot here. We know the brain development level of fetus at different stages. As a society we're generally ok with killing fish, reptiles and most of the society is ok with killing mammals. That places abortion cut-off anywhere between 3 and 6 months for the current state of the society moral development. And that is what most of the states have when they aren't dominated by anti-science organizations, ie when it isn't the situation of Catholic Church and Ireland for example.

Basically it boils down to what intelligence level we're ok to kill. Those pro-lifers chewing that juicy steak can't be more oxymoronic and hypocritical.

By your logic it's ok to eat a 3 month old fetus.

We kill for many other reasons than food as well as for no reason at all. Why did you choose the eating for your statement? Well, anyway eating your own species has selective pressure working against such a trait so your statement doesn't make sense.

Science has failed to define what a human life is (really what any life is). It has not enumerated the qualities that make us human nor has it established a plausible theory and effective model that allows us to assess the attributes of a developing fetus and declare, "this one is human, this one is still a pile of cells". (And that's not to say it hasn't been helpful in sussing out practical guidelines so far.) I respectfully disagree that terminating the life of a fish/mammal and a 3- or 6-month old human are effectively the same thing. We kill and eat animals because that's how our biology works, and thus it is mostly socially acceptable. We don't allow eating small human fetuses because they're, "basically just a mammal at that stage". There are things that make something decidedly not human, but so far we can't really agree on how to distinguish definitely a human from potentially a human. Until we understand exactly what makes us human, I'm uncomfortable simply sweeping that unknown under the rug, morally.

>Science has failed to define what a human life is ... It has not enumerated the qualities that make us human ... "this one is human, this one is still a pile of cells".

Those questions you pose is not really of scientific domain - they are actually equivalent reformulation of the religious question when/where "soul" is created (equivalence of the "soul" and "human" questions is established by the religious dogma that only humans have "soul"). Science has Cro-Magnons, Neanderthals, Australopithecus, etc... It is the question of religion domain whether Neanderthals or our common ancestors all the way to ancient apes were "humans"/"had soul". If notion of "soul" exists where did it appear between us and those cells $2B years ago to which each of us is connected through the continuous chain of bodies?

I agree. And that's part of the point. If we could scientifically agree on definition of human life, it would be way easier to navigate the abortion topic. But since we can't, it's currently entirely a social issue. The reason I didn't want to group abortion with CP under "silly socially issues" is that I'm still holding out on us being able to eventually understand our own humanity. And when we do, it may shed light on an agreeable framework under which to legislate termination of a fetus.

I'm not sure I see it that way. We're effectively biological computers that run an unknown, self-modifying program.

We know when the body begins to develop (conception), but we're uncertain as to what sensory input is being processed, whether that program is aware of its own state, and such things may vary between individuals.

We have bright lines, but none that have sufficient agreement about their use in all cases for legal purposes.

We are indeed biological computers. But this is a social problem. Socially we develop moral and ethical frameworks (codified as laws) in order to navigate the scenarios that come up in this biological thing we call life. It's not innately wrong to lust for someone who is younger than [country.min_adult_years] old; it's actually pretty biologically natural. However we socially agree that children are sexually off limits because we legally consider them unable to consent to sexual intercourse. My point was that abortion should not be grouped with "other laws that exist to protect vulnerable children" because it's more about the definition of a human life which is really hard and not about the vulnerability of a developing child's brain or decision making ability, albeit understandably easily conflated.

It's not hard to form definitions, it's hard to form ones that people will agree upon because there are many different interests in play and many different values. And it's not really that difficult to know whether a proverbial 'clump of cells' is developing into what everyone normally agrees to be 'human' or not.

The hard part is in forming the laws and deciding whether they should value undeveloped members of the homo sapiens genus for their species, for being intelligent, their capacity to suffer, or other reasons, then balancing whatever rights are assigned against the rights of others.

6 month old isn't a fish. You put words in my mouth. 3 month is about fish equivalent. 6 month is a pretty intelligent mammal and I'm against killing them.

I didn't realize that's what you meant. edited. Sorry for unduly implying anything about your character--that was not my intention. I thought you were just generally grouping fish/mammals with 3-6month old fetus brain development. Regardless it doesn't change my point.

I think the abortion discussion is much easier than its made out. I like Peter Singers approach to ethics which sets the goal to be avoiding of suffering. Now the question is easy: at what stage of the pregnancy can the being suffer?

The entire abortion conversation is completely ruined by most people wearing glasses colored with existence bias.

I think the main point is not who suffers, but who cares and why. We have a lot of people suffering around due to lots of reasons, but don't actually care to fix that. E.g. "abortion" after birth is biologically rejected by many, because it completely contradicts the evolutional efforts of a group to survive and reproduce. That's why children make many of us happy — if you're not happy or careful enough, then they're quickly dead, and your group is dead. Other animals have different strategies, from having hundreds of children to being pregnant for years, so child is ready to fall to the ground and go travel in five minutes.

Suffering has nothing to do with it, it's just a biological motivator for both parent and child to escape pre-reproduction death with insignificant side-effects like really, really missing a nice car or just an ice cream.

But while this topic is naturally highly dependent on "local" social rules, I think modern society should put responsibility and planning on the first place. If someone is not very sure that s/he can raise, care of, or simply enjoy the parenthood, it must be okay to abort it, unless that overweights all imaginable social programs. Like killing born children, for one. With modern society atomization and precision, abortion absolutely falls into "not your business" category in most places, unless one has very conservative and/or intrusive religious views, which is a bad thing itself, given how many completely different minds have to interact now on daily basis.

Your first paragraph explains what evolutionary forces have shaped our minds and societies. It's unclear why that should be a basis for ethics. If that was our goal we should all have ten children and user religious devotion to stay cohesive as a group.

If avoiding suffering is the issue ten anyone can be murdered morally under the right conditions. I can stab you in your sleep (painlessly), and that would be fine according to this criterion.

It would certainly not OK unless you also painlessly kill my wife, family and friends. Of course I would still be afraid of it because we have the irrational existence bias built in. I'm not particularly upset about the fact that I didn't exist 100 years ago so why should I be upset about not existing 100 years from now as long as no suffering is involved. Of course knowing that our existence is about to end causes as agony due to our biases. That doesn't mean though that we as a rational society should allow these biased to set or goals. We need to take them into account though.

Morally, that is only true for the first iterative pass. We are social creatures.

If you like Peter Singer's approach so much, then you agree with him that one should be allowed to "abort" babies for a long time after birth as well? No? I guess it's not so easy after all.

You're being hyperbolic but we don't allow children to make medical decisions for themselves until the age of majority, and parents can choose to make medical decisions that they know will result in the death of a child (eg refusing treatment for life-threatening diseases due to religious concerns).

So effectively yes, this is already the state of things, and there is no serious movement to restrict this form of post-birth abortion. Who would have imagined that all it would take for abortion to gain acceptance is to frame it as a religious liberty?

(correct answer: anyone who's lived in America)

>parents can choose to make medical decisions that they know will result in the death of a child (eg refusing treatment for life-threatening diseases due to religious concerns).

That is false. Parents cannot legally deny their children life-saving treatment.

Also, I'm not sure where I am being hyperbolic. Peter Singer literally does advocate for the "right" to kill young children for a long time after their birth. So if you say that Peter Singer offers an "easy" moral approach to abortion, I have to ask whether you actually do agree with his logic and follow it to the same ultimate conclusions that he does.

Actually I do agree with that as well. Where I'm much more of a bigot is when it comes to the much more obvious issue of how we treat animals. I was a vegetarian for several years but have up on it because I didn't believe it was making a difference. If we had a vote though to ban animal slaughter and especially factory farming I'd vote for it in a heartbeat.

It depends on the circumstances. We don't kill animals because we are hungry. We kill animals because we want more enjoyment from food. If you are somewhere starving and it's you it the rabbit, go for it. That's not the common situation though.

Euthanasia is a much more complicated topic and I find it bewildering that we are focusing on this discussion on babies. I assume it's out of some notion of protecting the adorable innocence. I think it's important with these topics to try to keep emotions out of it because they just reflect biases we have built in due to evolution. Evolution of course is not your friend. Especially not after you've procreated.

I wouldn't argue that we should legalize killing infants and toddlers, but I would suggest that the tendency for the whole society to lose its collective shit about infanticide is related to our discomfort with the legal status of abortion. Ethically, there doesn't seem to be much difference between an infant one day before and one day after birth. Of course, ours is not an ethical society, so killing one is perfectly legal while killing the other will inspire a vituperative media circus, widespread hand-wringing, and decades in prison. Why is that? It seems that mothers who kill their young children function as scapegoats, so that we may have a focus for the hazy sense of guilt that many of us feel about abortion.

So a fetus can't suffer? I think science has proven quite the opposite.

I think the point is that a fetus doesn't have the capacity to suffer before a certain point. A blastula of cells shortly after conception is not capable of feeling pain, but a fetus at 8 months likely is. OP is saying that it would be morally acceptable to terminate pregnancy before the point where we could establish that the fetus was capable of suffering.

Being unfamiliar with Peter Singers ethical approach, it was not clear to me from the parent comment alone that the notion of suffering extended also to a developed fetus.

While an interesting approach, I'm not sure I agree that the ability to suffer is enough of a definition of humanity to use in isolation. It also does not account for scenarios where one might be willing to suffer on behalf of another. In other words, I'm not sure there exists an absolute scale of suffering which we can use to judge the morality of such a scenario. Again, maybe I'm not familiar enough with this ethical framework.

Singer is definitively pro-abortion, for basically the reasons I mentioned. It's not terribly nuanced, it follows pretty directly from his basic ideas.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_Singer#Abortion.2C_eutha...

I'm not super expert about it either (at best a casual armchair philosopher), but from what I know Singers philosophy isn't specifically about suffering, it's about weighing interests. He assumes that the desire to avoid pain is one of the more important interests, hence it takes priority most (but not all) of the time. It's not black and white, it's more of a calculus about weighing the different competing interests of individuals, with certain classes of interests being given more weight than others.

I think Singers arguments in favor of abortion actually go farther than what OP's post implied regarding the fetus' capacity to feel pain. Singer argues that a fetus is unable to have any self-interests (including the desire to avoid pain), hence the interests of the mother should be given priority. I think this is taking it too far myself; I can agree with the delineation of the fetus' capacity to feel pain, but it is not clear to me at what point (if any) Singer feels it would be immoral to abort a fetus.

Just to clarify, Singer believes that you should be allowed to kill babies for years after birth.

I discovered last year that people are actually promoting this. I've been attacked by people because I do not agree with late-term (for no medical reason) and after-birth abortion:

http://www.slate.com/articles/health_and_science/human_natur...

It is almost in the same line of thinking that infants are not capable of feeling pain and why some operations on them were done without anesthesia:

http://www.nytimes.com/1987/12/17/opinion/l-why-infant-surge...

I believe some operations on infants are still being done without it:

http://gizmodo.com/why-are-so-many-newborns-still-being-deni...

"to this day, many procedures are performed on newborns without the benefit of analgesics. That’s largely because of an enduring misconception in the medical community that newborns don’t feel pain like adults."

Yep, there's also Antinatalism, which is the belief that having children is immoral. There are a few different strains, but greatly oversimplifying my favorite is that suffering in life outweighs pleasure, so bringing a new life into existence increases the net amount of suffering and is thus immoral.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antinatalism

> It is almost in the same line of thinking that infants are not capable of feeling pain and why some operations on them were done without anesthesia

While that sentiment is certainly a part of medical history, there's a good reason why many procedures on infants are still carried out without anesthesia today. Infants are fragile and most forms of pain relief we use on adults are simply too dangerous for infants. Any anesthesiologist will weigh the benefits vs. the risks for each particular procedure and for infants that ratio is considerably different compared to adults.

Is it really that dangerous?

"Key medical objections to infant anesthesia - that it was (a) unnecessary and (b) dangerous - were resolved by the brilliant research of Kanwal Anand and colleagues at Oxford from 1985 to 1987. Making precise measurements of infant reactions to surgery, they proved that the babies experienced pain, needed and tolerated anesthesia well, and had probably been dying of metabolic and endocrine shock following unanesthetized operations."

Source: http://www.nocirc.org/symposia/second/chamberlain.html

I'm not a medical doctor and not necessarily current on the latest research. However, there is quite a lot of evidence that general anesthesia is fairly likely to cause actual brain damage in infants and young children [1,2] with significant consequences in later life and there are (less significant, but still non-trivial) issues with various methods of local anesthesia. As far as I know, there's a lot of unsolved issues in the field of infant anesthesiology and the general trend is to err on the side of caution.

[1] http://www.webmd.com/parenting/baby/news/20120820/anesthesia...

[2] https://www.fda.gov/ForConsumers/ConsumerUpdates/ucm364078.h...

If there is a need for "repeated or lengthy use of general anesthetic" on infants there is usually already something wrong which could attribute to the said symptoms as well. It would be crazy to not use anesthesia on young children based on this warning, as shock (Which usually happens when operated on without anesthetics and the reason the child is silent during and a while after the operation) may cause worse damage.

The first reference I linked specifically controlled not just for disorders that could lead to similar symptoms, but even things like the mother's socioeconomic status, etc. The effect was still huge.

I don't think anyone's seriously suggesting simply forgoing anesthesia in life threatening cases, but people might want to rethink a routine tonsillectomy or some dental work.

More shocking than that you would even be allowed to die when you are ill and suffering too much. You know like we do with our pets because we love them and don't want them to suffer.

Yeah that's exactly what I was getting at. I couldn't remember if he had taken it that far but I thought I recalled reading that.

"While an interesting approach, I'm not sure I agree that the ability to suffer is enough of a definition of humanity to use in isolation"

The statement was not about defining humanity. Why is it relevant if something is human or not? Would it be OK to torture non-human life that's clearly in possession of cautiousness just because it's not human?

I think that the abortion answer is quite simple: let it be legal as long as the mother agrees to remove her womb afterwards.