And the demise of Catholic Authority in Europe continues to slide ever further. Once the bastion of ignorant catholicism and clerical authority Eire has cast off almost the last of the shackles that chained it to the cruelty of the past. All just weeks before the Popes visit...Long may the decline continue...
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2018/may/26/ireland-votes-by-landslide...?
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Surprised me!
It may be because Ireland has the youngest population in Europe, Nyar. A third are under 25 and almost half are under 34.
https://www.idaireland.com/invest-in-ireland/ireland-demographics
Also the scandals that the Church have been exposed as perpetartors including; peadophilia, murderering of 'unwanted' (illegitimate) children, horrendous abuse in orphanages, asylums and other institutions, harboring of offenders and spiriting them away to foreign countries over the last few years has contributed to the deep distrust of the Church that is showing itself today. It is a litany of crimes against humanity exposed by a few brave journos that has caused this 180 degree turnaround in Eire. And good on 'em too.
Good news!
Expecting a volcano to emerge in central Ireland any time now...a matter of days....
Congrats to Ireland: 66.4% for yes to 33.6% for no (source: The Guardian). It was about time! This is a question of basic Human Rights.
Excellent news!
Abortion is not a human right, but people will get abortions whether they're illegal or not, so really it's more about practicality than any sort of grandiose human right.
Glacier, why do you say that control over one’s own body is not a human right?
Self determination to how your body is used is a basic human right. If a fully formed human that had the cognitive capacity to experience physical and emotional pain, and was sentient required a kidney to live and it's mother were a match we wouldn't think it moral to insist the mother's body were used against her will to remove a kidney and save that child. So why on earth would anyone think it acceptable to force a woman against her will to carry an insentient balstocyst to full term and through child birth?
Well done Ireland for taking a step toward the 21st century and away from pernicious archaic superstition.
Though you're right that abortions tend to be higher in countries where they are not legal.
Because you're not dealing with just your own body in this case.
Perhaps not, but why should an insentient balstocyst have more rights than than the woman carrying it?
It's not about more rights, it's about a clash of rights. When you have a clash of rights, the one who is harmed tends to have more rights than you do. For example, your right to drink yourself silly has restrictions when you increase your chance of killing someone else in the process.
You have a right to masturbate all you want, but if you're doing in front of an elementary school, your infringing on the rights of children to not be subject to perverts exposing themselves. It's not that you have less rights than the children, but rather they are harmed more than you when your rights clash.
I disagree, and made clear why in my previous post:
We wouldn't allow a fully formed human to use it's mothers body against her will, even if it meant life or death, so if we allow a foetus that right, it axiomatically has at least one more right than a fully formed human?
@Glacier
Re: "It's not about more rights"
Yes it is. Unless and until a foetus can gestate in a box, prolifers are privileging the foetus's rights above the woman's. We are getting closer technologically to the day when a foetus can gestate in a box and when that happens we can revisit this debate, but until then, the independent organism's rights trump the dependent organism's rights.
You do know abortion rates are continuing to decline in countries with easy access to reliable contraception, right? They've been declining for decades.
Glacier: "..it's about a clash of rights.."
A balance of rights based on reason and evidence. The law (not a religion or clerical oligarchy) should decide.
How do you define "fully formed human"?
Life, (and yep, human life too!) is a continuum, a cycle, the cycle by necessity has death and rebirth. But the life cycle continues on in the offspring. The highly complicated version of basic cellular mitosis. We have no souls. We are a collection of cells working together, the cells also frequently dividing as needed.
Scientifically speaking: a zygote is not all that different then a hair strand from our head that just so happened to through a specialized process acquiring additional but similar dna information from an ever so slightly different hair strand. So that the new strand of hair may be more likely to survive.
Now we humans, with our fancy brains, we like to place special value on ourselves as a collection of trillions of cells working together. Problem lies in the reality of the situation is: we are not nearly as special as we like to be. It starts getting real messy when you mix that in with another bunch of other problems that do not measure up to reality , like religion and "souls."
Messy, where a simple step in the cycle of life people equate the "recently fertilized egg step" as somehow being the same as a full fledged human adult capable of taking care of it self, and even start the process of reproduction over again. The two are in no way the same, you can not describe a human as a pinhead sized fertilized egg, with a cell count in the single digits, and then try and say that is the the same thing as an organism with trillions of cells.
Edited for clarity.
@Glacier
Do you believe the soul enters the body at the point of conception?
@Sushisnake Wut? Soul? The dumb thing about abortion discussions is that people try to turn rational discussions into religious discussions.
Abortion seems wrong to me, and that's nothing to do with religion. A lot of things seem wrong to me like racism and that also has nothing to do with abortion, though 200 years ago people would be like "so do you believe black people have souls?"
Instead of rational discussion, both secularists and religious types look around, and see which side the people they agree with religiously support, and then blindly support it without thinking. There are certainly many secular arguments against abortion if you must know. eg: http://www.prolifehumanists.org/secular-case-against-abortion/
I believe it was a question not an assertion, and just because an argument is secular doesn't automatically qualify it as rational or moral.
"Atheists may not have a pope, but in the eyes of many there is still a proper dogma that all good atheists must adhere to. To be an atheist is to support abortion. "
That's from your link, and it bodes badly that they start their argument against abortion with a disingenuous generalisation about atheists.
1)I am an atheist but I don't "support abortion", and never have.
2) I support a woman's right to decide what happens to her own body.
3) Nothing about my decision is based on dogma.
4) There is no atheist dogma, as atheism is simply the lack of one single belief.
Abortion is a complex moral dichotomy, that article started by doing precisely what you are accusing Sushisnake of doing, by making a baseless assumption about those who champion equal rights, that this somehow "supports abortion" the two phrases are not nearly the same thing at all.
@Glacier
Well I had a look at the "secular argument" you directed me to, and I found a lot of emotional hyperbole like this:
"Would we kill a two year-old whose father suddenly abandons his unemployed mother, in order to ease the mother’s budget or prevent the child from growing up in poverty? Would we dismember a young preschooler if there were indications she might grow up in an abusive home? If the preborn are indeed human beings, we have a social duty to find compassionate ways to support women, that do not require the death of one in order to solve the problems of the other."
but not much rationality. You probably missed it because the opinion echoes your own.
"How do you define "fully formed human"?"
In exactly the way I just specified? For example an insentient blastocyst that lacks the cognitive ability to register either emotional or physical pain and doesn't therefor have the ability to store memories or make emotional attachments is not a fully formed human, by definition. Though this doesn't alter the fact that to try and force a woman to use her body against her wishes to prolong the life a foetus that without her would be unviable, is a right we would not grant to a person already born and able to survive on it's own.
Again why would we grant a right to a foetus we would not to fully formed humans?
A foetus can feel pain, yadda, yadda long before birth though. Does that mean you're in favour of the Ireland route of banning after 12 weeks but against the Canadian route where there are no restriction even up to the minute before birth?
"A foetus can feel pain, yadda, yadda long before birth though. "
Not according to the Royal College of Obstetricians and Gynaecologists.
"A foetus in the early stages of development lacks the developed nervous system and brain to feel pain or even be aware of their surroundings. This is reflected in the Royal College of Obstetricians and Gynaecologists’s report on foetal pain, which concludes “ existing data suggests that cortical processing and therefore foetal perception of pain cannot occur before 24 weeks of gestation”.
https://www.rcog.org.uk/globalassets/documents/guidelines/rcogfetalaware...
Of course this doesn't address my point, that you want to confer a right to foetuses that fully formed adults don't have, quibbling about terminology is largely moot.
@Glacier
Re: " the Canadian route where there are no restriction even up to the minute before birth?"
Let's ignore the ridiculously emotive " even up to the minute before birth" bit* and take a look at what's actually happening in Canada, hey? These reports were released in April last year:
"In hospitals in 2015, according to the Canadian Institute for Health Information, 31.1% of abortions were performed at less than 8 weeks, 36.9% between 9-12 weeks, and 2.5% at 21+ weeks. There is no gestational age information provided for clinics; however, very few clinics provide abortions past 21 weeks, so we have estimated the actual percentage of abortions at 21+ weeks to be closer to 0.59%.
Why Late Term Abortions Are Necessary
A small number of abortions occur after 20 weeks of gestation primarily because the fetus is gravely or fatally impaired, or the woman's life or physical health is at risk, or both. Many impairments or health risks are not detectable until after the 24th week of gestation."
https://www.google.com.au/url?sa=t&source=web&rct=j&url=http://www.arcc-...
https://www.google.com.au/url?sa=t&source=web&rct=j&url=http://www.arcc-...
* ask a doctor, midwife, obstretrics nurse or even just a woman whose given birth why that's a ridiculously emotive claim. Ask a woman in early labour who's timing her contractions how bloody silly it is.
@OP
And ireland legalized gay marriage a few years ago, the youth are more educated than ever in Ireland and are taking their country right where it needs to go.
The moral questions of abortion is purely theoretical for me and I am really torn. For one scenario;
I think if a healthy women that likes to fuck around and is too stupid to use effective contraception is prepared to kill her own healthy baby then she is prolly not going to be a good mother anyway.
If a girl got raped by someone with AIDS then I can't see why she shouldn't be allowed to abort.
Scenarios like this do my head in and I just ignore the question really.
Wow... @Terminal Dogma... Your logic is crushing. If you ignore the question really, why do you feel the need to share your non-fully formed opinion? What about other scenarios, like just plane rape (no STDs involved) or accidents in the use of contraception? Or just a shitty situation that guarantees the future baby a shitty life?
P.S. Well said, @Sapporo. What about just freedom to choose on ones' body?
TD, you wrote, “I think if a healthy women that likes to fuck around and is too stupid to use effective contraception is prepared to kill her own healthy baby then she is prolly not going to be a good mother anyway.
If a girl got raped by someone with AIDS then I can't see why she shouldn't be allowed to abort.”
1. Having an abortion is not the same as killing a healthy baby.
2. That first sentence of yours...how ‘mandona and the whore” can you get?!
3. So you are saying that there are differences in fetuses based on how they were conceived?
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