Nobody who will be born in the future has been born yet. By choosing to use a condom or birth control, are we killing those people? What's the difference between a sperm being inside an egg and outside other than some sort of religious spiritual mumbo jumbo or philosophical possibility? At what point does a fertilized egg become a "person," and who are you to determine that?
All those progressive people you condescend to are not "supporters" of abortion. Almost nobody "supports" abortion, and hardly anyone is ok with late term abortion.
Those progressive people are generally thinking beings who have morality. They think about things rather than accepting an arbitrary criteria such as whether someone is born or not. For most it is whether the bundle of cells is a sentient being capable of experiencing, something a zygote most certainly is not. A zygote is not a person by any reasonable standard. It has the potential to become person with lots of help from its environment, as does every combination of viable sperm and egg on the planet.
Every sperm may be sacred, but every sperm is not deserving of equal protection.
It doesn't seem that way.
Most efforts to legalise abortion are based on the argument 1) that women have a right to do what they want with their own body, or 2) that abortion has social benefits. And since the progressive side of politics is making no real effort to stop abortion after the embryo has become a foetus and developed a nervous system it's probably safe to assume that women's rights and social benefits are far more important to them than whether an foetus is 'sentient being capable of experiencing'.
This is not much different, since as a non-sentient individual, the fertilized egg is a part of the woman's body. I can't speak for others, but I certainly look for the line when a foetus becomes a "person."
I'd like to see some surveys on how many Americans support abortions in which terms and why, but haven't found any.
> that abortion has social benefits
This is a supporting argument only relevant when the underlying action is ethical.
Executing stupid people may have social benefits, but it is not ethical.
Yeah, me too. Anecdotally, most people seem to be fine with first trimester, reluctantly accepting of second trimester, and against third trimester (except where the mother's life is in danger).
A. Destroys information from the universe.
B. Destroys /genetic information/, which is an evolutionary mechanism.
C. Slows evolutionary development, as beneficial mutations are already rare enough - increased abortions also increase the loss of a punctuated-equilibrium event.
This "combination" and "potential" as you note, is strike-on why it deserves equal protection and ought to be viewed as sacred. (Not sperm, but the zygote)
2. Social Difference. Now note, I'm not suggesting that every such zygote /will/ be that Einstein, but historically greatness have come from unexpected circumstances. Da`Vinci was a bastard child of a female peasant, aborting him (if it was modern day) would have been strategic move to save the face of his more upper class father.
A. Preemptively: yes, the chances of any Churchill is also chances of a Hitler. Admittedly, an abortion might also have destroyed the next genocidal tyrant. But ironically, this is not a justification - because it is that very act of destruction which is why we hated those men in the first place.
B. A society with no Hitlerbabies is also one that will never have Churchills. A society with Hitlerbabies is also one with Churchills. The former society is definitively doomed, the second at least has a chance of succeeding. And as entrepreneurs/hackers, we know that this risk variable is the key which makes and breaks.
Conclusion: A universe with more information is genetically more fit for evolutionary survival. And a universe which has a plus-sum of social progress is probabilistic in success, versus a neutral or destructive society as having an absolute convergence of failure. The difference between even just only 1% and a NULL solution is an infinite gap.
> A. Destroys information from the universe.
Does erasing a blackboard or wiping a hard drive destroy information from the universe? I can hardly think of an action that doesn't destroy information. Moving destroys the information of where we were immediately before. Think destroys the thoughts we had prior. Do we have a moral imperative to preserve everything that exists in the present? If so, we are pretty screwed. BTW, information can not be destroyed from the universe, but that's a bit pedantic and beside the point.
> B. Destroys /genetic information/, which is an evolutionary mechanism.
Your body constantly creates unused genetic material in the form of billions of sperm each day. You can argue that a zygote is more complete genetic information, but it is (almost) no more information than the sperm and egg contain separately. Better stop beating it - every sperm really is sacred to the universe.
> C. Slows evolutionary development, as beneficial mutations are already rare enough - increased abortions also increase the loss of a punctuated-equilibrium event.
Seriously? This doesn't deserve a direct response, but it's addressed below.
Apparently we have a moral obligation to produce a maximal number of offspring and ensure that every egg is fertilized. Otherwise, we are robbing the universe of its precious information and stopping our evolution. That is the logical corollary of your silly rationalizations for why you oppose abortion. And if we are supposed to help evolution along, shouldn't we stop allowing stupid and fat people to breed and preserve our resources for the most fit? No, because none of what you say is the basis for any sort of morals - it's complete nonsense.
Side point: Animals kill their unfit young, or young they are unable to care for. Are they also stopping evolution and sinning against the universe? Or are they contributing to evolution by removing poor genes, and contributing to the survival and health of the species by preserving resources for young that can be cared for. Or is evolution an undirected process, which can't be "stopped?" Oh yeah, I forgot.
The second part just reinforces your idea that we are morally obligated to maximize our offspring to create as much genetic diversity as possible, which is on its face ridiculous. Of course, you neglect that genetic diversity is not the only, or even the primary determinate of whether we have "Hitlerbabies" or Churchills. In fact, much if not most of the difference is environmental, which incidentally is helped by aborting babies that will not be raised in a healthy environment, and are therefor more likely to bring violence and suffering to the world. Maximizing births is not the way to produce your uberman.
I'm not sure why I bothered responding, this is such a load of nonsense.
A. No, because a blackboard is not a biological organism which is capable of manipulating the environment. When a single man (which required being a zygote first) can invent a wheat that can "save a billion lives" (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Norman_Borlaug) - then yes, it matters.
It also matters if they abort his education. Zygotes develop and acquire informtion, and the more of it, and the more collaboration from these humans from zygotes results in fundamentally world changing and humanity-pushing events. (As well as, admittedly, ones that scale humanity back, unfortunately - but abortion is the aid to this, not the contender.)
B. Red Herring, Straw Man. I like how you switched the argument over to sperms to make a sassy comment but then failed to actually refute the evolutionary mechanics of genetics. Right, because you can't. A subsequent zygote is fundamentally different in its genetic makeup than the one before - so why not keep both?
C. Ad Hominem. If my argument is "silly" why do you use logical fallacies?
Actually yes, a universe full of more information is simply progressive. Are you now arguing for destroying information? I hope that doesn't mean you are going to delete your comment - that would, afterall, be consistent with what you are proposing. However every new comment you add is providing unique insight - one which hopefully others will analyze and make beneficial conclusions from. In the same way as (A).
Stupid and fat people have actually produced rather intelligent offspring, surprisingly. Do you deny this? Because if you do, we first might need to have a discussion about not being intolerant.
When did I bring morality into it? I never did, just sheer math and evolution. I don't need morality to prove my point.
Are you proposing that we /should/ kill our young and unfit? I suggest not, but you seem to be refuting this - which puts you in an awkward position.
This is what I summarized from your last paragraph: "aborting babies ... helps [reduce] violence and suffering."
> A. No, because a blackboard is not a biological organism which is capable of manipulating the environment.
Your statement was about removing information from the universe, not biological diversity. Evolution is a processes of removing biological diversity - that's how it works, so it may be ugly at times, but hard to call it unethical.
> B. Red Herring, Straw Man. I like how you switched the argument over to sperms
The argument is about removing genetic diversity, and if it applies to zygotes, it applies to sperm. Every sperm has unique genetics, so why not use them all? In fact, lets clone every egg and sperm and generate every possible combination - that will help evolution along. You have to follow statements to their logical conclusion, and in this case, it's absurd.
> Are you now arguing for destroying information?
Destruction of information is as important as creation. Forgetting is as important as remembering. Evolution is a process of natural selection, meaning those organisms not selected are lost. The human brain forgets almost everything it perceives so that it can remember what's important. Death is as important to evolution and species survival as birth. So yes, I am perfectly comfortable with the "loss" of information.
I'm also comfortable with the loss of zygotes before they grow into sentient beings who are likely to lead a life of suffering and imposing suffering on others. Our species certainly does not need genetic diversity at the expense of other qualities.
> Stupid and fat people have actually produced rather intelligent offspring, surprisingly. Do you deny this?
No, but both characteristics are genetically influenced. Smarter people produce smarter offspring, and fat people produce fatter offspring. My point was not to advocate for eugenics, but to point out that if we are trying to help evolution along, that's the way to do it, not making unlimited babies.
> When did I bring morality into it? I never did, just sheer math and evolution. I don't need morality to prove my point.
Ok, so you are just advocating for a maximally dominant species, without regard to ethics. In that case, see above regarding helping evolution.
> Are you proposing that we /should/ kill our young and unfit?
No, I'm not suggesting that. I'm merely following the trails of logic.
> "aborting babies ... helps [reduce] violence and suffering."
Yes, aborting zygotes who are unwanted and are unlikely to be cared for certainly reduces violence and suffering, both for them and for those they will impose suffering upon.
Churchills, as you call them, by and large come from loving, supporting families, have access to opportunity and education, are well fed and sheltered, and have strong communities.
I don't know Churchill's biography, but I'm going to guess he was no gutter baby.
A. 1. Yes, you caught me there. I did say information, and then moved on to genetic information. Your point is valid against "information" in general. So I shall admit to that and move onto the important parts.
2. Evolution is the process of continual genetic diversity - natural selection is the process of eliminating the unfit. So you can't flip this.
B. Sperms, no. Zygote potential, yes. Therefore I would find it ideal to generate every combination, and play it out. This is not absurd at all - it is Evolution. No?
"Death" see (2)
I'd also like to point out that smart people come from fat people, skinny people come from stupid people, and skinny from fat and smart from stupid.
--> And zow! I believe we've hit the crux of our disagreement. Maximal evolution.
Well, I find the perspective of not protecting the young / killing of babies as an avoidable option, since we are the dominant species, we can manipulate our environment to restrain natural selection in favor of our own.
It appears, that you favor natural selection's brutality against us, and encouraging upon zygotes in unfavorable circumstances, thus diminishing their life.
I would argue against your assertion that "they'd grow up violent and suffering anyways" -- but that appears now to be pointless, since we've found our fundamental (and unfortunate) disagreement.
Thank you for sharing, I'm going to sleep now, it was interesting learning your perspective! (Feel free to reply, just don't bait me to respond back! lol.)
> B. Sperms, no. Zygote potential, yes. Therefore I would find it ideal to generate every combination, and play it out. This is not absurd at all - it is Evolution. No?
This is all wrong. Evolution and naturals selection refer to exactly the same process. If you want to separate them, evolution is the result of natural selection over time.
Your concept of "maximal evolution" doesn't make much sense to me. Regardless, the numbers in that scenario exceed the resources of the known universe.
I think we are far better off overall growing our species at a rate we can support with all the benefits of society rather than maximizing our gene pool. In fact, I think your proposition sounds far more brutal than mine. Streets filled with unwanted crack babies and accidental teen mothers sounds nightmarish. I'll take offing some zygotes any day.
Talking about the universe is odd, considering that the issues around abortion mostly affect society, and at a push humanity. On the universe scale, there is no more information destroyed/created by having an abortion than by raising the child. The universe does not know the difference between a human's life and the absence of a human's life.
1C) assumes that the abortee will have more children overall if the child is not aborted than if they are not. This is hardly something that can be assumed, given how people's lives can be massively affected by a child. It also takes a very micro scale view of evolution; I do not think many people believe that adopting a policy of encouraging very large families is something that is good for the planet, and unfortunately for us, what is bad for the planet is usually bad for us (in the long run). However, when you make an argument that appeals to evolution, the long run is the only run that matters.
2's point on historical greatness coming from unexpected circumstances is most likely the product of massive selection bias. I would be very interested to see a study showing significant difference between the distribution of the backgrounds of "great people" and "normal people".
2A equates the destruction in abortion to the destruction in the Second World War.
2B references a society with no Hitlerbabies, which doesn't seem to really be what anyone is discussing here. I think it's fair to assume that there is a near to uniform distribution of potential across aborted children, meaning that there isn't a clear reason why there should suddenly be no Hitlerbabies/no entrepreneurs.
But seriously, how do you write a comment about the affects of abortion on society without talking about the woman who is having the abortion.
Discussing things in terms of the "universe" is simply with respect to an alternate universe. "One universe no babies are aborted" and the other "Universe where babies are aborted". The former has greater opportunity for outpacing the information than the second. True, my first argument is not making much of a statement about society or morality - just information.
1C) Correct, but it should be noted that there is a difference between the /gain and loss/ of information in a system, versus merely the /total/ information in a system. So here are the differences: "+1 +2 = +3", "+1 -1 +2 = +2", "+2 = +2". While a family might eventually have 2 children after they aborted 1, that is not necessarily mutually exclusive from them having had 3.
I unfortunately have to play the http://overpopulationisamyth.com/ card. While I understand that vast majority of people are frightened about and do not encourage people having "large families", it is all based on an irrational fear originating in Malthus' wrong mathematics. He forgot to calculate for technology.
Technology, interestingly enough, is a direct result of available information within a system, and the collaboration of multiple minds. This really is where the (seemingly obscure?) comments on "universe and information" become consequential to human behavior and development.
2. True -- history is a massive selective bias. And this is my point, great people come from horrible as well as fantastic backgrounds.
2A. No no, I was actually saying that abortion could have killed Hitler in the same way it could have killed Da`Vinci. I was being realistic.
2B. Yes! There is a uniform distribution of a variety of potential personalities (from opposite extremes of Hitler and Churchill, and everywhere inbetween) in the continual development of a human from zygote to adult. You will get diversity.
Abortion, instead, shrinks this diversity. Which is bad, because then you don't get the extremes that push humanity forward (as well as the ones that push it back). But a plus-sum gain is always better than a zero-sum gain. Abortion, by its virtue of destroying information, is a reduction.
Because I am interested in the /origins/ of the woman that was or was not aborted. If she was not born, how can I talk about her?
This is the basis of your entire position and it is both false and reduces to absurdity.
Having more babies does increase the genetic diversity of humans. Genetic diversity however is not the only or even primary determining factor in just about any measure of human success, including generating Churchills.
Absurdity: This creates an imperative to reproduce as rapidly as possible and maximize genetic diversity, without regard to the resources or environment available. Why is a fertilized egg more valuable than all the unfertilized eggs that could be fertilized - in this framework, they it is equally imperative to bring both to life?
Even if "overpopulation is a myth," that does not mean maximum population is a virtue.
Could you explain why the explosion of human population in the last several thousand years (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Population_curve.svg) is possible, and why it does not imply success? Particularly with the limited resources we've overcome with the advent of crop rotation, agriculture and farming, technology, etc. - and the limited resources today we are still solving for and continually will do so?
It looks like we need a criterion for "success" and "evolution" and "progress"! I would love to hear your input.
Population is certainly a measure of success for a species, however it is not a particularly good one in my opinion.
China's population boom occurred during one of its least successful times in history. China's current success comes at a time of minimal population growth. What's more "successful"? A prosperous society with a static population, or a starving one with a rapidly growing population?
Was China of 1970 more successful than Europe of 1450? It had more people...
Plus, I think terms of "success" with respect to a /nation/ is slightly skewed when compared to the "success" of genetics or species. I don't think that is an accurate cross-comparison.
Given all those things being equal, certainly a higher population would be more successful. However fast population growth is likely to work against most of those goals.
I don't see that as morally relevant, despite your consequences.
Cancerous cells in my body are genetically unique human tissue. I fully support their eradication.
But maybe they're not human enough. If I use genetic engineering to combine my thumb with a tiny snippet of DNA from Joseph Stalin, so I could show off my eclectic "Stalin Thumb," it would be genetically unique human tissue. My fancy thumb has no rights equivalent to those of other humans.
Say I'm in a lab that catches fire. Because of the massive imminent backdraft, I have time only to save either the old lab tech, Fred, or a shelf of petri dishes containing 10 million blastocysts. According to the unique genetic material hypothesis, if I don't watch Fred writhe in flaming horror, then I'm a monster, committing one of the worst genocides in the history of the planet. (Note that a blastocyst has fewer cells than the brain of a fly.) I would contend that there is no amount of blastocysts you could save to justify letting Fred die in a fire.
I can't accept "genetically unique human material" as the sole determinant of moral responsibility, it just causes too many problems.
I might tend to agree with you that 24 weeks is too late based on a quick look around:
"By 22 weeks, your baby's nervous system completely 'connects'. The vital link between their brain and spinal cord (the brain stem) now matures and many nerve cells make vigorous connections. When this happens your baby becomes capable of recognising warmth, light, sound and pain. While primitive brain waves have been detected in unborn babies as early as 7 weeks, it is not until 22 weeks that sustained patterns can definitely be recorded. Some women will now notice that their baby 'jumps' with a loud sound. "
http://www.birth.com.au/Pregnancy-week-by-week/Weeks-21-22
If no brainwaves have been detected prior to 7 weeks, I'd probably set that as the lower bound for when abortion should be legal.
Animal rights seems to be something that even people who often have strong opinions tend not to discuss.
Some similarities though are that we need to speak out for the people and animals who can't defend themselves and the opposing sides on of each issue tend to talk "past" each other.
What is a human? Is it any biological organism that is genetically identifiable as homo sapiens? Is it our bodies? Our minds, hearts and 'souls'? When asked to draw a "human", a man will sketch a head, a torso, a pair of legs, two arms. On the most basic level we see this shape everyday in our lives - that is what we all subconsciously equate the word "human" with.
Is it all there is to it? Shouldn't we be focusing on what makes us human as the philosophers would see it? Creativity, spontaneity, our thoughts and dreams - everything that goes on in our brains? Consciousness?
There will be more and more debate in the coming years as the concept of what is "human" will come under fire. Technological advancements, medical innovations and strong AI will throw our preconceptions under a train and force us as a species to reconsider, for better or for worse.
Do you see how the abortion debate stems from different understanding of the same concept? There is no right and wrong.
Dictionaries rule over our minds.
But that is a horrible reason to fight for the right of others. So why not simply fight for the most abstract definition of "human"?
People used to say only fair-skinned people were human. Now we look back on those people as being bigots for having too narrow of a definition.
Two predictions:
1. The future will look back on people who defined "human" as only being outside the womb (or nerve-braincell-connections) as being narrow minded bigots.
2. The people who fought for the human sanctity of zygotes will also be the people who claim sentient AI are "not human" and are ok to kill or enslave. Irony full circle.
This sort of post is absolutely unintellectual and unacceptable for Hacker News.
One which you would agree, should not be posted.
To preempt another meta-reply, I'll also state that the wittiness of this post is uncontroversial, and thus a valid post for the better humor of the community.
It's the destroying of a genetically unique individual human that is the issue. No matter how far along the continuum of development they are.
Humans are just self-replicating collections of atoms that emerged through chance and evolution, and pain is just an emergent phenomenon formed by electrical impulses travelling over neurons to signal things that we evolved to avoid. So there is no absolute moral reason to protect the coherence of a particular collection of atoms over another, or to favour a doctrine of hedonism over pain.
Ultimately, to optimise for something, we need a criterion on which to optimise. For the above reasons, I consider preserving human biodiversity, or some kind of hedonic pleasure-pain balance as a fairly meaningless thing to pick as a fundamental thing to optimise for in the scheme of things (although it may emerge as a result of another more meaningful optimality criterion).
I consider the diversity of information / knowledge (that is, information that encodes something true about the world, not just random entropy) recorded in the universe in a form that can be processed by intelligently acting constructions to be a more fundamental thing to optimise for. Obviously, picking what to optimise for is completely arbitrary - it is used to justify everything, but it is like an axiom - there is nothing else to justify it in terms of.
Optimising for such knowledge means protecting the intellectual independence of constructions that create, process, and support the construction of such knowledge. Since this is primarily humans at the moment, this means ensuring that humans are not oppressed. Pain and fear of death are means of oppression of humans, and so it makes sense to ensure that living, thinking humans capable of knowing fear and feeling oppressed do not have to fear that they will be subjected to arbitrary death or pain for their intellectual activities.
One way to do this is to strictly enforce a no humans killing humans older then some certain amount of time after conception. If the amount of time after conception is too high, an age at which the person can know that they are at risk of death and fear it, then it will be oppressive. However, an embryo or fetus is very unlikely to be know that abortion exists, or to do anything differently to avoid it, and therefore abortion cannot be oppressive like murder or torture is. Anyone capable of knowing about abortion is too old to be killed deliberately by it.
No one would really know about or have reason to fear getting killed for at least a few years after birth at the earliest...
Please do not commit a red herring and a straw man by arbitrarily assuming that it would "require gods or souls" without providing any logical reason as to why it would.
2. Combinatorics, Not Morality.
Genetic uniquness is the complete antithesis of a "moral, supernatural, superstitious, spiritual" judgement - it is instead a cold hard evolutionary reason - see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5393246 in these comments for why. In fact, you later support this - as noted below.
3. Pain, Fear, Death, and your Contradiction.
You assert that "oppressing and killing humans" is bad. Then you invent a new criteria - not based on oppressing and killing humans, but just whether they know they are being killed and oppressed. This has the following errors:
A. It contradicts your objective criterion of information. (Because it logically has to, as seen by 2)
B. It is more subjective, because it depends upon the human being aware of their oppression/death.
C. Not all humans are aware of their oppression or death (gunshot from behind) - your standard would then mean it is okay to let all those people be oppressed and die. I do not think that was what you were going for. (Note: this sounds like a ridiculous argument, and it is because I'm intentionally pointing out the rational absurdity of your vague criterion.)
D. You then conveniently "oppress" a human embryo by assuming that it is indifferent to dying - despite that its biological function is to keep itself alive (whether conscious or not).
E. Yes, so per your very own criterion, there would be no problem with defining that line as "0 days after conception" - so why not? Better safe than sorry.
Genetically unique? So it's ok to kill an identical twin?
Edit: Also, what is suffering and is it different from pain?
I had two qualifiers in there: unique and individual. Each twin is its own individual.
Once the egg is fertilized and becomes a zygote it is genetically unique.
(An ovum wouldn't implant. That would be a zygote.)
Ethics and morality in philosophy are generally based on minimizing the experience and perception of suffering, not promoting diversity - though diversity can certainly help reduce suffering.
Disclaimer: I have no expertise in the field of ethics and morality.
My girlfriend is however (has worked under Paul Bloom at Yale specifically in moral development, and is in a fully funded PhD program for moral development), and "minimizing the experience and perception of suffering" is not the "general basis".
Note: The author of the parent comment was not trying to make a moral judgement, but a biological and evolutionary one. That abortion is mathematically not beneficial - so there is no need to make a moral argument when there is a scientific one. (That is, not to say, that a moral one ought not be made.)
Certainly you can argue about a billion types of ethical frameworks, some of which may differ from this statement, and you can argue about the definition of ethics and morality. The prevailing basis of morality and ethics is most certainly minimizing suffering. Without sentient experience, ethics are meaningless. That's why in most frameworks we don't worry about the treatment of non-sentient things outside the context of the sentient experience of them, and we debate whether ethics apply to things based on whether they are sentient. Notwithstanding issues relating to these objects relationships to other sentient beings, we don't worry whether it's ethical to sit on a chair or pee in a toilet.
The parent comment was drawing an ethical conclusion from a biological fact, and certainly did not say anything about abortion being or not being "mathematically beneficial," whatever that means.
I am sure you were discontent with the summary, and had to scroll down to some other section which was closer to your bias.
I am also not sure how you can claim to know that the author /was/ drawing a moral conclusion, when he (just as you note about math) never said anything about it.
You asserted morality to trivialize his comment, I was merely pointing out the logical error in jumping from "biology and genetics" to "morality".
Throw morality out the door, and the point still remains.
I scrolled down to the part titled "Defining ethics," which happened to be the first section, thinking that would be applicable to defining ethics.
If you read author's comments in the thread, you will see he is clearly making the point that destroying a zygote is a moral issue, as he says:
> It's the destroying of a genetically unique individual human that is the issue
in response to a question about whether destroying a zygote is "wrong".
Throw morality out the door, and he is stating that a zygote is genetically unique for some strange reason in a thread about the morality of abortion.
Besides, his implicit point is also wrong - that a zygote is distinctive in being genetically unique. Each sperm is also genetically unique, so it's a rather inapplicable statement to the context of the thread, unless masturbation is also a sin against the universe.
I don't do much voting honestly.
> I don't understand how if one is viewing the subject from a evolutionary genetic perspective, why it is wrong to say that mechanisms that go against evolutionary development (abortion) are wrong
If anything goes against "evolutionary development" it is using technology to increase genetic diversity without regard to fitness.
Anyway, abortion does not go "against evolutionary development" any more than celibacy or monogamy.
Directed evolution is a whole different ball game that presupposes an active god or a detailed master plan. Either way, that is not evolution as most scientists would view it or as Darwin theorized. And regardless, humanity is not at risk of spoiling such plans.
Each sperm is also genetically unique.
And your definition would allow the abortion, or even adult slaughter, of a twin, or two of a triple. That is an interesting opinion.
Gee, how come nobody thinks murdering people is wrong?
Fucking jackass.
If you find I've been combative, it's only because your comment insults the intelligence of anyone who reads it.
Because the article concerns attempts to prevent cruelty to animals, ie. pain and suffering. For most if not all of the legally allowed period in the US for aborting fetuses, a fetus doesn't even have the developed nervous system to feel pain, or the basic cognition to experience suffering. So those concerns aren't at all valid.
If someone was making the argument that we shouldn't eat meat at all, because killing animal organisms is wrong, then abortion would be relevant to bring up.
Humans are killing countless numbers of microscopic organisms everyday, both out of necessity and a desire to stay healthy (using antibacterial products and antibiotics), so at least personally i think an edict against killing is a silly idea. Cruelty and killing are not one and the same though.
Another, probably larger one, is abortion. Otherwise progressive, considerate people rationalizing that it's alright to kill people just because they're not born yet. It's generally inconsistent with the other positions people who support abortion take.