United States should downsize the population by ending all immigration and creating incentives for having fewer kids.

[sundin13]

NightlyPoe said:

sundin13 said:

How exactly is "human life" defined?

Once a life starts, it's human.  Life starts at conception at which point it is a separate entity.  Hence my original answer.

And why should this "human life" inherently be protected?

The right to live is the most basic of rights. Without it, all the others are meaningless.  After all, the right to speak or worship as you choose is meaningless if someone has the right to end your life before you can do so.

In this vein, do you consider it abhorrent when the plug is pulled on someone who is brain-dead and on life support?

Keeping a body from naturally expiring through artificial means is a separate ethical question.  Indeed in many ways, you've presented an inverse of the question of abortion.

-In one, the question is whether medicine should be allowed to be used as a method to intervene with nature and terminate a life.
-In the other, the question is whether medicine should be mandated to intervene with nature and artificially extend a life.

As such, the overlap between the two is not as great as you may believe.  For myself, I am not an absolutist on the subject.  To give an extreme, I certainly wouldn't favor forcing patients onto ventilators against their will.  However, I tend to side with caution when it comes to withholding or withdrawing life-extending medical intervention.  If there's doubt or controversy, I will typically side with life.

But either way, I don't believe that asking such a question (or any other ethically thorny question) sheds as much light on the subject of abortion as you might believe.

1) And hence my issue with your original answer. There isn't really any argument within your assertion of "once a life starts it is human". It is largely a circular argument which relies on a belief in the argument's own trueness to prove its trueness. But again, there is a lack of clarity in both the term "life" and the term "human". What make something alive? Is it the fact that it contains living cells? Is it a conscious awareness? Is it its ability to survive on its own? And what is the meaning of "human"? Under the dictionary, a human is basically something with the features and qualities of a human, but a fertilized egg fails to reach even that low bar. Why is it human? How is it alive? And why do those questions matter

2) Again, you are largely missing the question. There is a significant non-moral and non-religious answer to the sanctity of life regarding individuals post-birth. One of the facets of that argument discusses the strength of society. It should be intuitive that a society that considers murder wrong is a lot stronger than a society which does not. However, the same doesn't really apply to abortion. If you consider abortion from a pragmatic viewpoint, it provides many benefits. These include: Increased access to education and increased labor force participation, which are both important factors to reducing poverty and inequality. It also provides agency, rights and control over their body to women and bringing it back to the overall question of this thread, it helps to reduce birth rates in a way which doesn't rely on heavy handed government control. The argument for the wrongness of murder simply doesn't extend to an argument for the wrongness of abortion, which is why such an argument needs to be made independently of the inherency argument.

3) My purpose in asking this question is because I think it is a discussion regarding the sanctity of life, and it is another situation where ending a life does not produce negative societal outcomes, and in fact may be a positive choice for society. It is also an interesting parallel as it is a discussion of whether to mandate interference to ensure a human who isn't viable be kept alive. The difference here is that this is done using machines whereas a child is kept alive using a woman's body. I don't mind dropping this particular example though.

4) Another point of curiosity, do you believe in exceptions to your ban on abortion, such as in instances of incest and rape?