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Old 05-02-2008, 12:02 PM
Seigi Seigi is offline
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Quote:
Originally Posted by Makedde View Post
You condemn abortion for being murder, yet you would have no problem with murdering those who have, or perform, an abortion?

Does that sound just a little hypocritical to you?
To condemn murder but have no problem with murdering those who commit murder is not in of itself hypocritical. Change the type of murder to one not in debate: instead of "abortion", pick "shooting". "Shooting random people is bad. Shooting people who are in the act of shooting random people in order to stop them is good. Shooting them after the fact in order to prevent future occurrences is acceptable." That would represent a consistent set of views and, if shooting is changed to generic murder and abortion considered a murder, conclude that murdering those who abort to be acceptable. No hypocrisy is necessary.

As an aside, my line is the appearance of brain activity – frontal lobe to be accurate but activity anywhere to err on the side of caution. Any abortion prior to that I consider to have the same morality as a contraceptive, any after to have the same morality as killing a child a minute after birth. Brain stem formation is about the 7th week (http://brainmind.com/FetalBrainDevelopment.html). That gives a window of 3 weeks to notice a missing period, get tested for pregnancy, make a decision to abort, and leave a safety window; inconvenient but not impossible.

I base this off counting the number of people in Siamese twins, off my own conditions for pulling the plug in the event that I fall into a coma, off the part I would recognize as human if a person were broken into parts and each part placed into a new body with the other parts being artificial (a macabre thought experiment, to be sure, but an enlightening one), that I consider a person completely on life support to still be a person and that is it not okay for the owner of the machine to kill them (rejects the argument that a fetus being dependent makes it okay for a mother to abort), and how I would consider an amputated limb if medical technology existed to grow the rest of the body back around it.
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