Massachusetts Vote May Change How the Nation Dies



I support this initiative (but not from Massachusetts). I strongly believe that control over your own body is a fundamental right.

A person has the right to exit this world as they see fit. If a persones quality of life is to the point of living in example,pain. Then they should be given a choice by thier own free will.

This brings about the problem of life insurance policys and how they would need to change.

Nice you guys agreed on something!

Maybe there is a god.

boring! everyone agrees. next topic

Not so quickly.

Why is control over your own body when you are dying is more important over control over your own body after you got pregnant?

I never understood making suicide against the law. If you want to take your own life, that should be ok, the problem I have is when you want to take some one else's life.

obvsly because there is more than one life involved! why can a mother decide to kill her child one day, but not the next?

im not totally opposed to abortion, because people who want them will be shitty parents anyway. but this discussion will inevitably devolve into trimesters, viability, etc. and then it becomes as dumb as the drinking age or any other law that attempts to correlate the motion of heavenly bodies with social behavior.

This is a valid question. Why arbitrarily decide that moment of conception is when humanity starts? Life is cheap, you kill plenty when you sanitize your hands, it is what constitutes child is much more relevant question.

As to Death With Dignity - control of your body has to be uniform right. You should have the right to die, the right to undergo an abortion or even a right to do radical genetic or stem cell treatment on yourself.

So, what constitutes a child Sini?

I think the demarcation between clump of cells and baby human, is more of a religious/spiritual question than anything.

To the best of my knowledge science has not stepped up and provided a firm answer, regarding the large grey area between fertilization and birth.

Mostly thats why I wish the topic would just go away. There isnt a fixed answer, just a bunch of opinions based on spiritual notions.

If there was a fixed, provable answer I would happily support such a position.

Good question. Better question is what makes human sentient.

While I can't answer your question directly, I can tell you what does not constitutes a child - a blob of cells with no central nervous system and no capacity for sentience.

Well, the best answer I have is that anything that is most likely to become a child, counts. So, an egg by itself doesn't count. Likewise for sperm. A fertilized egg is more likely to become a child than it is to become a toaster oven, so that's where I tend to draw the line. However, I recognize that many fertilized eggs do not develop and that is why my personal stance on the issue is to limit abortions to the first few weeks.

No, if I have to explain to you why a human life is more important than an amoeba or a cat or a bear, then there is no point having this discussion. Here's a hint, it doesn't have anything to do with why or how we are sentient. Rather, it is that we are or have the capacity to be.

Don't you think this is a question you should be able to give some semblance of an answer to if you're going to have an opinion? Personally, I like to educate myself a bit before I form an opinion of any given subject. Perhaps that's a fundamental difference between us.

I know enough to understand limit of my knowledge and not go with an arbitrary answer.

Judging potential to become something is not a good way to create a forward-looking test. It is easy to look back and say, yes this was X and realized its potential to become Y because you don't have to consider many X that did not become Y.

Look at it this way, you don't look at a bag of flow and call it potential cake. It is flower, it has potential to become cake.

You tell me to educate myself, yet you have no clear understanding what human life is. Surely you can see a difference between a human and a bunch of tissue that has a potential to become one.

Here is question for you. A person gets into car accident and suffers irreversible and complete brain damage. Ventilator is used to sustain life. If I turn ventilator off, do I kill a human? Do I kill a sentient being? Can you be a human and not sentient?

wow. if i didnt always post from my stupid phone, i would love to do some cutting and pasting from this thread and the one regarding the big bang we had a few months ago. theres some cognitive dissonance going on around here!

so where were you going with this when you injected abortion into this debate? didnt think it thru, mayhap?
painted yourself into an intellectual corner, perchance?

allow me to throw in another topic: do the right to die-ers and abortionists among us believe in human organ sales? can i sell my aborted fetus?

Epic fail. I addressed your rebuttal before you even made it, and you still made the rebuttal that I knew you would. I really don't think you even read my posts.

Let's use your cake analogy though. Take some flour (sperm), on its own, as I stated, not going to become a cake. Take some eggs and milk (egg), again, as I said, not going to become a cake. Mix them together and put them in an oven (womb), and the chances of them becoming a cake just shot through the roof.

A cat can have kittens in a oven, but that don't make 'em biscuits.

Both are issues of control over your body. Stop pissing on my grave and read the thread.

No you didn't. You alluded to human life, minus sentience, being somehow exceptional. It isn't, unless you bring in metaphysical soul, but at that point logical argument is over. Hence I started questioning you with a hypothetical brain death example that you have avoided.

Just come out already and say that you believe that fertilized egg is precious because it has soul and stop beating around the bush.

I think the pertinent question , is if it is not *yet a human - why should the woman be obligated by law to keep the oven on? That oven costs resources to operate, and she might not be ready to eat cake yet. In fact if the flour did become a cake, it might be an almost certainty that the cake would simply spoil and go bad, because the baker wasnt prepared for it to be baked.

But if its not a cake yet, your not wasting cake by turning the oven off. Just the batter. Or, maybe you screwed up the mix and the batter is no good.

Either way, it might be better for the bakers, and the eventual cake to be baked at another time.

Are you delusional or did you really only read the first part of my post?

Amazing.
Yes, you're killing a human. No, it has nothing to do with a "soul." It doesn't matter whether or not you're still aware. The reason is, that from here to "reason to kill anyone we want" is a pretty short step.

Derid,
I figured my "first few weeks" caveat would cover that.

My problem with abortion is two fold. One, the father has no say. Two, at some point (I said a few weeks in) the "random mass of tissue" is far enough along that it is, by any reasonable measure, a human and therefore its life is sacrosanct.

I guess my problem is interjecting the govt into that gray area.

While you seem to see the concept of it being a short step to killing anything we want, I guess I see the concept another pretext for govt to stick its guns in peoples' faces based on an arbitrary opinion as the larger problem. Further filling our overloaded prisons with alleged abortion doctors, and women who miscarried does not strike me as a tenable solution.

Though I do agree with you, with regard to fathers' rights. Thats a tricky one. There lots of fucked up situations in general that can and do happen with regard to fathers' nonexistent rights in this country.

But in the larger scheme of things, the well off will always have access to abortions. Forcing the less well off to take their abortions underground I do not think will really improve things. Nor will a glut of children that the parents and govt are both incapable of caring for properly. I think it would just exacerbate our existing problems.

I think we have a lot of fixing to do in other areas, before we start meddling with the abortion status quo.

I think the best approach that does not infringe on anyones rights , feed the corrupt police state/prison industry, or cause sudden societal upset is for pro lifers to simply spread their message to convince people not to abort. To spend their own effort adopting where needed, and to spread the word on adoption and such.

Convincing individuals to make the "right" decision, is always better that using a gun to force an opinion on someone.

By in large I agree with you. One reason I keep harping on this is because Sini is an advocate for having the government pay for abortions. It is no more ok for the government to use its force to take my money to pay for abortions than it is for the government to use its force to tell people what to do. I advocate for the extreme opposite because I hope to find a compromise somewhere in the middle, where I can be happy with it. If I start from the middle then the compromise ends up somewhere that I'm not going to be happy with.

Ultimately, I'd like to see this issue resolved on a state by state basis, then you can live where you like the rules and avoid the places where you don't.

We do have a myriad of other issues to solve while tackling this one, but I think we allow any one of those issues to sit by the wayside at our own peril. The other side isn't going to leave any of them alone, and they have massive machines to drive their agenda. I am back in school after a 15 year career and I can tell you that, while I remember there being some campus organizations in 1994, there weren't nearly as many as there are now and they all range from center-left to pinko-commie. If we let any one issue sit while we work out all the other problems, then by the time we get around to dealing with it, the vast majority of the country will be so desensitized to the issue that they won't listen to advocates for change.

Don't force me to pluck a chicken. Definition of what constitutes a human has to be agreed on before we can determine what exactly means to kill a human. If you take a sentience out of this definition, well then you left with all kinds of overly broad definitions.

Here are some "humans" according to your definition:
a. A cadaver
b. A bunch of human skin tissue in a petri dish
c. A wart on your foot

My personal definition for killing a human being is as following: Permanently removing all capacity for sentience.

Again, whatever you views are - they have to be consistent at what it means to be a human. A brain-dead body on a ventilator is a carcase, a heap of meat that is nether human nor has a capacity to become a human.



Slippery slope fallacy at its finest.

People recover from comas and vegetative states all the time. The Shivo case in FL is a good example of someone who was still sentient and yet unable to care for themselves.

a. Is dead
b. apart from the rest of the body, isn't able to survive and isn't aware
c. a fungus attached to a human, not a human

For fuck's sake man, do you even read the stuff you post? Its like you have nonsensical responses that you just copy and paste without regard to whether they actually apply.

How about you demonstrate how the slippery slope is a fallacy, rather than your typical out of hand dismissal of other's points that are rooted in historical fact. Perhaps you should google eugenics. Hell, you might even learn something about the heroin of the left, Margaret Sanger.

I don't think you have a background to understand what I am saying.

You have to start with a definition of what is a human being. If you don't know exactly what it means to be a human, then you don't exactly know when you are killing one. This definition cannot be descriptive, especially if you only focus on biological functions, because our biology is in no way unique and descriptions compensating from the facts will be prohibitively long. This is why I linked Diogenes vs Plato debate - it nicely demonstrate fallacy of trying such approach.

Easy way to demonstrate fallacy of such definition is deconstruction - given a human being minus a leg, is it still a human being? You can remove pretty much any part of human anatomy and still have a human being.

To spare you a crash course in philosophy - what matters is our cognitive abilities, or sentience. What makes us human is our ability to collect, store and process information about the world around us. Cogito ergo sum.

Nitpicky stuff:

Wart is a virus, it hijacks your body cellular mechanism to produce its own tissue. This was used to demonstrate that simple continuation of existence is insufficient.
Cadaver is a whole body, this was used to demonstrate that wholeness is not a good test.
Tissue in a petri dish (or brain dead person on ventilator) shows that 'of human' is not a good test.

Since you cannot come up with a working definition of human being that would also include fertilized egg, then you have to concede that both suicide and abortions are issues of control over individual's body.

You are obviously welcome to try coming up with a definition that would solve your problem and I will continue demonstrating it to be flawed.

It assumes discrete transition from "taking brain dead person off ventilator" to "reason to kill anyone we want" is inevitable or even likely.

Formally:

Your implication is contingent on "reason to kill anyone we want" not being true while "talking brain dead person off ventilator" is true.

Meh, getting off topic.

Ask anyone if they would want to spend the rest of their life alive hooked up to a breathing machine and you'll likely find the answer to be a distinct " NO ".

There are a lot of things the government spends our tax dollars on that we don't agree with. ( Aid to Pakistan, big oil subsidies, Obamacare, GM Bailout, insertwhateveryouhatehere )

Abortion funding is likely one of the cheapest. :|

The only reason Abortion keeps topping the lists is likely due to religious beliefs ( imo ).

I disagree with your opinions, but appreciate your clarity.

I understand what you're saying, I just dismiss it. I don't have time right now but I will expound later. Although I will say that basing your world view only on what some cat who died 2000 years ago said is the same thing you laugh at others for...

Oh, there is lot more. I presented very basic/core idea of it. I just don't want to drown you in information, but if you are interested I can talk more about it.