However murder is defined as taking the life of a human being. Conception is not a logical place to ascribe the beginning of a human being.
As an example, is the loss of a zygote, or a blastocyte, or an ectopic implantation to be considered the death of a human being?
Birth control actually prevents implantation rather than conception every once in a while [2], would taking birth control be considered manslaughter if proven it prevented implantation rather than conception? This is actually what many are worried about now that Roe v Wade is down, Griswald vs Connecticut could be up next.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Miscarriage
[2] https://www.guttmacher.org/antiabortion-activists-their-own-...
What about spontaneous abortion (miscarriage)? If the women is found negligent such as taking excessive risks (smoking, drinking, excessive age, some strenuous physical activity) they are also technically committing manslaughter correct? Again regardless of how viable it is to prosecute such a crime, are they committing a crime?
It is both wrong and a crime to forget your child in a hot car to the point where they die. It isn't murder but it would be on your conscience regardless of whether the state prosecuted you or not. As I believe the unborn have an equal right to life as the born children it makes logical sense to enact laws such that crack use resulting in deformed children is a prosecutorial offense tantamount to neglect of born children. Of course, there is also criminal negligence vs. accidental crimes and all of that still applies.
EDIT: miscarriage isn't abortion, I'm not sure about its relevance to the discussion?
What say you on ectopic pregnancies where it will never be viable and poses a threat to the mother?
Of course leaving a baby in a car is potentially manslaughter nobody is arguing that because there is general agreement that child is a person. The question is why you believe a fertilized egg is a person? Why is a separate sperm and egg combination not also considered a person? Why is conception the bright line? Why would you leave something as serious as homicide up to the state to decide?
Naturally in cases where you can only save one life but not both it makes no sense to let mother and baby die, this is logical and provides a terrible ethical dilemma for doctors to figure out where the borderline is - at what point is the risk to the mother so great that it warrants an abortion? These types of dilemmas are common as far as I understand in medical ethics.
I believe an unborn baby is a _person_ with the same intrinsic human rights as you and I, so I see no logical difference except in degree of uncertainty between the baby in the car and an abortifacient killing an unimplanted zygote. Of course the degree of uncertainty is very important legally. If I through an unforeseeable action end up being responsible for the death of an employee of mine, it matters how certain the outcome was based on my negligence. Maybe no one will ever know that I was in some way responsible but it will live on my conscience nonetheless.
Involuntary manslaughter does not require conscious choice to kill, premeditate conscious choice is murder, you brought manslaughter into the argument.
Just as someone drinking and driving does not intend to kill someone they can still be found guilty. A woman older than 35 having unprotected sex which could lead to geriatric pregnancy could be considered to putting an unborn person at risk due to much increased chance of spontaneous abortion.
>These types of dilemmas are common as far as I understand in medical ethics.
These choices will be easy in states that outlaw abortion with no exceptions because there will be no choice.
>I believe an unborn baby is a _person_ with the same intrinsic human rights as you and I
If zygote is a person does that mean freezing embryos that may never be used is homicide? Is embryo selection in IVF also homicide when only picking some of the embryos?
No state as far as I'm aware is outlawing abortion in the case of emergencies in the health of the mother, this is a common misunderstanding people have about anti-abortion legislation.
More on IVF tomorrow if I have time :)
Abortifacient - a substance that induces abortion. How is this different from abortion, that makes no sense logically or grammatically.
If a zygote is a person, then any action by another person which kills it is a homicide. If taking a birth control pill prevents implantation then you have committed homicide.
My point is you define abortion as a conscious choice, but that is not the definition of abortion, that is specifically induced abortion. You said just like manslaughter is not murder they are different, however manslaughter is a crime as is murder. Are you saying manslaughter should not be punishable or that abortion that comes from non-copious choice is not manslaughter even though a zygote is a person and the law would normally define that as manslaughter?
>No state as far as I'm aware is outlawing abortion in the case of emergencies in the health of the mother, this is a common misunderstanding people have about anti-abortion legislation.
Louisiana had a trigger law on the books since 2006 that did not have exceptions for ectopic pregnancies, luckily a democratic senator helped push a revision in the law very recently to make the exception [1].
The point being the is left up to the states and is also homicide if the fetus is a person. Hopefully it will be a justifiable homicide in all states.
[1] https://gov.louisiana.gov/index.cfm/newsroom/detail/3727
I use manslaughter as an analogy to explain gradations of homicide in terms of intent. I've been very clear that I don't think abortifacients as birth control make sense to be prosecuted at all, they aren't manslaughter in the legal sense because there's no way of knowing if anyone was killed or not!
It looks like your Louisiana case fixed a law that didn't make those important exceptions explicit (probably because it was a useless law anyway, only to signal a pro-life stance with no legal weight to it, but who knows?). This is good, the exceptions mentioned are just and necessary.
Not all homicides are illegal, all weigh on the conscience though - whether they be a soldier in war or a doctor performing euthanasia. Certain classes of homicide should be prosecuted to the full extent of the law to provide a just society and minimize the repercussions of injustice by penalizing perpetrators. In the case of a person making a conscious choice to end the life of an unborn baby they are making a decision that humans have no right to make in a way that leaves clear evidence and can be prosecuted. By the way, I personally think that doctors performing abortions should be prosecuted and not mothers.
Christians believe that all human beings are corrupt to the core. We take every aspect of the technological progress we've made and twist it to evil purposes, that's just what we do as humans. This is related to our dignity, our capacity for doing things gives us a unique capacity for evil. Some evil we do has terrible repercussions on the world at large and abortion is one of these evils. It unnaturally shapes our demographics in this country and in every country where it is allowed unrestricted. For example the black population of America is unnaturally small in proportion to the white population because of Roe, and there are more men than women in India and China because of abortion. Anti-abortion legislation doesn't help get those millions of lives back, it doesn't give them justice either. In my mind its primary purpose is to curb the wrongdoing in the future.
Your stance is a zygote is a person, yet you believe that killing one should not be prosecuted in the same manner as killing a born human it seems. Manslaughter does not require intent and is still a crime, either you believe the zygote is a person or you don't, if a person then the laws regarding killing a person should be the same. If you are ok with different laws between a zygote and born human then you must believe the zygote is less than human.
>This is good, the exceptions mentioned are just and necessary.
Something as serious as homicide should be codified at the federal level right? Why would you leave something like that for interpretations between states?
>Christians believe that all human beings are corrupt to the core.
Christians also believe god created everything including designing humans and their corruption correct? Where did evil come from? Did god create evil or is evil bigger than god and was not created by him? Again where did evil come from?
> Something as serious as homicide should be codified at the federal level right? Why would you leave something like that for interpretations between states?
Believe it or not, the exact opposite is true: https://www.criminaldefenselawyer.com/resources/state-crimes...
> Christians also believe god created everything including designing humans and their corruption correct?
Genesis 3 describes the origin of sin. God created people with the capacity to sin, He even set up a situation where they had complete agency of choice in the matter which is pretty amazing philosophically with the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. However, we used this agency to choose sin and continue to do so to this day.
'Evil' as it pertains to human sin is a choice to behave contrary to God's will. God gave us the ability to be evil but didn't make us evil. In some sense it's part of the dignity of humankind that we have the capacity to do evil at all, but it is also our fall. With the fall in Genesis 3 we opened a rift between God and humankind, basically we ruined the relationship. We believe Christ gives a way to reconcile the relationship by paying the price for our evil on the cross.
Is that what you call someone not believing the same thing as you and trying to get specific answers to logical questions? I am trying to understand why someone seems so fixated on personhood beginning at conception. I personally believe there is no good good line during pregnancy when someone becomes a person, it is a process that takes time, anything we pick is arbitrary to satisfy human law. For instance a zygote can split and become two people (identical twins) so I would think if you believe in a soul as the basis for personhood, ensoulment can not occur at conception.
Roe was a compromise, an imperfect law for a complicated matter where by it got progressively harder to get an abortion as the pregnancy progresses. Not only did it grant the right to an abortion, it also prevented it later in pregnancy, that is now left to the state.
>If you kill someone and no one ever knew including you then law is kind of irrelevant right?
Getting away with manslaughter does not change the fact whether it is a crime. You seem to be avoiding answering the question, do you believe taking birth control that prevents implantation is a crime? Regardless of the ability to prosecute, is it a crime of manslaughter? If not then obviously you do not think the same law applies to zygotes as people.
>Believe it or not, the exact opposite is true
So you are ok with a state outlawing abortion with no exceptions as Louisiana had for some time and there should be no federal protection for that situation?
Do you believe Griswold vs Connecticut should be overturned as well?
>'Evil' as it pertains to human sin is a choice to behave contrary to God's will.
How can the universe and anything it which was created by god act contrary to his will? That makes no logical sense, it was his will to design it as such in every detail. He is the Alpha and the Omega, the buck stops there. He also is omnipotent and knows everything including the actions we will take, or do you believe he does not in fact know everything?
If god has no control over our actions and is even surprised by them then there must be a source of entropy that did not come from god, who created that?
>we opened a rift between God and humankind, basically we ruined the relationship.
How does one ruin a relationship with their designer unless the designer is schizophrenic? If I design a program I do not blame the program for bugs, that's stupid, it is my failing. Perhaps there was an OS or hardware failure that caused the problem, but as god I designed them too! There is no one else to blame, certainly not my creation.
So what should we do in your opinion? Are the unborn entitled to protection by our laws or not?
>Roe was a compromise, an imperfect law for a complicated matter
Roe wasn't a law, it was a legal precedent dehumanizing a class of people for another class's benefit. Now we do have actual laws that are made by legislatures across the country to try to do justice to a complicated subject as you admit it is.
>So you are ok with a state outlawing abortion with no exceptions
Of course not, this is the opposite of what I said.
>Do you believe Griswold vs Connecticut should be overturned as well?
There is a class of 'living constitution' decisions made by the supreme court during this era that are contrary to rule of law and make the supreme court into some sort of super-legislature. I think people should have access to contraceptives, I'm not sure it's guaranteed by the constitution though. Not all contraceptives are abortificients, even those should be accessible for the reasons I gave above, health concerns primarily.
>How can the universe and anything it which was created by god act contrary to his will?
Yeah, it's crazy! Christians think we have real agency even given the sovereignty of God. It borders on paradoxical. God surely knows the path we will go down and judged it necessary for some reason. Apparently He preferred beings capable of deciding to follow Him of their own free will rather than automatons.
>If I design a program I do not blame the program for bugs, that's stupid, it is my failing.
What's more impressive though? Designing a program that can choose between multiple options and determine its fate or designing a program completely constrained to make the choices I orchestrate? And yet, we would be comfortable saying a programmer would be totally justified if they shut down or even deleted a program erring as you've described!
I think Roe was a good compromise affording choice to the mother up to a point while protecting the unborn later. Again why do you fixate on conception, what turns cells merging and replicating into a person and why is it at the point when the sperm and egg merge, not before and not sometime after? Why did you choose that line to take your stand?
>Roe wasn't a law, it was a legal precedent dehumanizing a class of people for another class's benefit. Now we do have actual laws that are made by legislatures across the country to try to do justice to a complicated subject as you admit it is.
Decisions made by the Supreme Court are law regardless of whether you like them or not, specifically case law. Trying to act like it wasn't a real law is a petty argument, it obviously was until overturned. I am skeptical you believe this should be left to the states since because if you truly believe this murder why would you be ok with letting some state allow it. You seem to think this is very simple reducing a person down to a zygote but not a sperm and egg in a very black and white manner.
>I think people should have access to contraceptives, I'm not sure it's guaranteed by the constitution though.
The constitution does not guarantee the right to assault rifles specifically, are you ok with leaving that decision up to the states? Arms is a very open ended term as is the right to privacy this must be interpreted by the court to have specific meaning, currently allowing assault rifles but not nuclear arms and contraception but wire tapping is allowed with a warrant.
>Apparently He preferred beings capable of deciding to follow Him of their own free will rather than automatons.
The distinction between free will and automatons has no meaning to a being that creates everything including free will itself. To have true free will not predetermined by god would require outside input, it would require a source of entropy that was not created by god. The only way god could not control our actions is if there is uncertainty from some other source otherwise we are doing exactly as we where designed. Either the universe is deterministic as god designed or is non-deterministic due to outside input, simple logic.
>What's more impressive though? Designing a program that can choose between multiple options and determine its fate or designing a program completely constrained to make the choices I orchestrate? And yet, we would be comfortable saying a programmer would be totally justified if they shut down or even deleted a program erring as you've described!
This still make no logical sense, did god create everything including all choices possible or not? God created the constraints unless you believe there is something beyond god a greater universe created by whom?
If a programmer creates a sentient AI that makes its own choices I guarantee it will be getting input not created by the programmer that helps form and drive its choices. A programmer is not god and did not create everything, and if he did I would hope he would not be so stupid as to blame his own program for bad choices based on input he created!
>Decisions made by the Supreme Court are law regardless of whether you like them or not, specifically case law.
This is a fair point. I don't want to equivocate on the word 'law'. I was referring to law as codified by elected legislature but you're right that 'common law' is also law in a different sense :)
>The constitution does not guarantee the right to assault rifles specifically, are you ok with leaving that decision up to the states?
I guess? If we throw out the constitution we'd better have a replacement system with an equal force behind it. Otherwise history can dictate what happens next when a power vacuum forms in a pluralistic society: authoritarianism.
Free will is kind of a paradox. If you design a game, you also design the space of possible games that can be played (the game tree). You can also determine a function on the space of these games to label some as 'good' and others as 'evil'. When you create players of the game and they choose to go down an 'evil' tree was that your fault? I think this is where the paradox comes in. You can make fancy arguments about entropy all you want but for a Christian we believe the players in the game have real agency of choice.
Christians aren't the only ones who believe in agency - justice (retributive justice specifically) requires agency, otherwise it makes no sense to penalize someone for wrongdoing as it was their environment that caused their behavior _always_ rather than their own conscious choice. If you want to live in a society with no retributive justice that's a fair and even perhaps logically consistent viewpoint but it isn't one that Christians share. Our worldview holds that the economy of justice is fundamentally retributive justice because we have real agency of choice.
Both the sperm and egg are "alive" so no "life" does not begin there. Any sperm and egg combination together is a unique genetic sequence, both before and after conception. This also cannot be a unique "person" because identical twins form after conception into two unique people. Same with clones, the same genetic sequence does not make a unique person, what ever personhood is comes later, it is a potential person just like a sperm and egg is before conception.
There is no single bright line I can find, as I said any line drawn is arbitrary to satisfy law. I believe Roe to be a good multistage compromise based on trimesters, you believe conception to a be a single line for the law, neither has any scientific or religious basis. During biblical times "quickening" was thought to be when ensoulment occurred, first movement.
>If you design a game, you also design the space of possible games that can be played (the game tree). You can also determine a function on the space of these games to label some as 'good' and others as 'evil'. When you create players of the game and they choose to go down an 'evil' tree was that your fault?
As god you didn't just create the game, you created the laws of physics that allows the game to exist and the players themselves. God designed our brains and how we make decisions.
This isn't a fancy argument this is very simple, did god create everything or not (including evil) and does he know everything or not (including what choices we will make)?
Again its seems rather stupid to blame your own designed creation for making choices that you know they will make in a universe you created for them with laws of nature designed by you. This makes no logical sense unless there is outside influence to allow for surprising choices. Either god understands exactly how everything works because he created all of it, or he doesn't and can be surprised by bad choices and blame this "agency" that comes from somewhere outside of himself.
>If you want to live in a society with no retributive justice that's a fair and even perhaps logically consistent viewpoint but it isn't one that Christians share.
Of course I don't, but it's not hard for me, I don't believe in an omnipotent god that designed me just to punish me for making incorrect choices. There seems to be uncertainty baked into all things that creates agency and choices matter, I have personal responsibility for my choices because they affect the world around me, this is logical. I don't believe things are predestined or known ahead of time nor that some super being designed me and is judging me for how I perform in their sandbox, it is a ridiculous illogical notion.
'Life begins at conception' is just a nominally secularized reference to the doctrine of ensoulment, not a concept that is morally relevant to question of whether abortion should be legally permissible (or even interesting).
If we cared about the mere fact of life in the relevant way, we'd be interested in legal restrictions on pulling weeds. If the concern was with living tissue with human DNA, we'd be fretting over amputations. Even in the case of human life, not every end to human life is an equivalent of 'murder' to be categorically prohibited to the exclusion of all other considerations. And even if we grant that abortion is always morally wrong, it still does not automatically follow that categorical legal prohibition is a sound social response to the moral issue.
There's an expansive philosophical literature on the ethics of abortion that actually seeks to identify and address the moral core of the issue and its relation to law. The phrase 'life begins at conception' is just a political slogan for a religious dogma that very, very quickly falls apart when you try to use it ss an actual starting point for reasoning about abortion policy. Trotting it out pretty much represents a refusal to engage in good faith with secular thought on the issue.
If murder is wrong for the born, what about the unborn makes that wrong lesser?
Maybe the most clear case comes in this way:
Christians believe that human beings are chosen by God just as much as they choose God (both must be true to be saved). This is most clear in Romans 8:29-30.
> For those whom he foreknew he also predestined to be conformed to the image of his Son, in order that he might be the firstborn among many brothers. And those whom he predestined he also called, and those whom he called he also justified, and those whom he justified he also glorified.
So God does decide who to save, he "foreknows" them, whatever that means. Now there are several examples of people being called by God, many of which happen before they are born.
Jeremiah is called by God before his birth in Jeremiah 1:5:
> Before I formed you in the womb I knew you, and before you were born I consecrated you; I appointed you a prophet to the nations.
Paul is called by God before his birth in Galatians 1:15:
> But when he who had set me apart before I was born, and who called me by his grace, ...
These are just some examples, there are more references to unborn in the Bible. The argument goes like this: if it's wrong to kill another being imbued with the image of God, fully capable of being foreknown by Him, called, predestined, justified and glorified, it is equally wrong to kill them before birth as opposed to after birth and the Bible makes no distinction between the two in terms of how this process works, evidenced by the above passages.
Weird Calvinist predestination silliness aside.
> As you do not know the way the spirit comes to the bones in the womb of a woman with child, so you do not know the work of God who makes everything.
Quite simply, according to the Bible life begins at conception, our capacity for good and evil begins at conception, God chooses us at conception and our status of being in the 'image of God' starts at conception.
The above verses and doctrine are not 'Calvinist', Calvinism is the belief that God's choice is the primary cause of salvation as opposed to man's choice, but that distinction is irrelevant here.
Let me start with this: why should we as rational human beings assume life doesn't begin at conception? Is there a more logical place to ascribe life beginning, whether it be human or otherwise?